Cervantes the Poet travels from the court of Isabel de Valois to Rome, Naples, Palermo, Algiers, and Madrid's barrio de las letras. Recovering Cervantes' nearly forty-year literary career before the publication of Don Quijote, Gabrielle Ponce-Hegenauer demonstrates the cultural, literary, and theoretical significance of Cervantes' status as a late-sixteenth-century itinerant poet. This study recovers the generative literary milieus and cultural practices of Spain's most famous novelist in order to posit a new theory of the modern novel as an organic transformation of lyric practices native to the late-sixteenth century and Cervantes' own literary outlook.

‘Ponce-Hegenauer has contributed something quite new and important to our understanding of the genealogy of Cervantes' Don Quijote: that the origins of the Quijote (and by extension, of the modern novel) lie in the mixed prose-lyric forms best exemplified by the Renaissance pastoral novel-and not, as is commonly supposed, in the epic or in the books of chivalry. Cervantes the Poet represents an impressive scholarly achievement.'

Anthony J. Cascardi - University of California, Berkeley

‘Cervantes the Poet offers a truly innovative approach to Miguel de Cervantes, helping us to better understand the poetics of his masterpiece, Don Quijote, while really focusing on the first twenty years of his life and literary career, emphasizing the bonds between lyric and subjectivity (as well as madness), which overlap with the modern novel's main narrative goals. Cervantes the Poet is an outstanding monograph that promises to carve an important space for itself in the crowded field of Cervantes studies.'

Rodrigo Cacho - University of Cambridge

‘A richly detailed reconstruction of the author’s life and Spain’s fertile cultural landscape, Cervantes the Poet offers a bold reassessment of the origin of the European novel.’

Ian Ellison Source: Times Literary Supplement