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's nearly forty-year literary career before the publication of Don Quijote, Gabrielle Ponce-Hegenauer demonstrates the cultural, literary, and theoretical significance of Cervantes's 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's own literary outlook.