• Translation by Gaye Kynoch.

• Through the centuries Don Quijote has delighted readers, inspired artists, stimulated thinkers, and helped form historians' perception of early modern Spain. It has, furthermore, played a major part in the development and theoretisation of one of the modern world’s most characteristic literary forms: the novel. In its own playful and non-systematic fashion, Honest Entertainment, Transcendental Jest. Six Essays on Don Quijote and Novelistic Theory explores the reception of Cervantes’ masterpiece with special attention to its significance for the theory of the novel. A book about books about a book about books, this volume is essentially an introduction to the theory of a seminal modern literary genre as approached from the vantage point of the outstanding, truly epoch-making work. Chapters can be read separately as introductions to individual cervantists or theorists of the novel (including Friedrich Schlegel, Viktor Shklovsky, Georg Lukács, and Milan Kundera), but are also connected via a unifying theoretical theme —the question of what is the ultimate direction of novelistic mimesis: towards abstract ideas or worldly phenomena?— and the discussion of the continuous recurrence of the opposition between Enlightenment and Romanticist literary aesthetics in the theory of the novel.


CONTENTS

Foreword
Introduction

I. Enlightenment Reception of Don Quijote
1. Baroque, Enlightenment and Classicism — 2. Mayáns y Siscar’s «Vida» — 3. Intermezzo — 4. Vicente de los Ríos’ “Análisis” — 5. Enlightenment Concept of the Novel

II. Athenäum-Romanticsm
1. Prefatory remarks on Romanticism — 2. Background — 3. Friedrich Schlegel’s reading of Don Quijote — 4. Schelling’s theory of symbolic language — 5. The Romantics’ Allegorical Aesthetics — 6. The Novel According to the Athenäum Romantics

III. Georg Lukács’ Theory of the Novel
1. Lukács Readdresses the Schism between the Romantics and Hegel (and Goethe) — 2. Life Immanence and Epic Totality — 3. Great and Minor Epic — 4. The Demonic Born of the Collision between Counter-Reformation and Enlightenment — 5. Perspective — 6. Concept of the Novel in Theorie des Romans

IV. Viktor Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose
1. The Formalist Project — 2. O teorii prozy — 3. Confronting Symbolism — 4. Showdown with the ‘Ethnographic School’ — 5. Primacy of Form — 6. Constructing Don Quijote — 7. Shklovsky’s Concept of the Novel — 8. Marthe Robert between Lukács and Shklovsky

V. Erich Auerbach’s Theory of Realism
1. A Talented Reader — 2. Cervantes’ Arabesque Realism — 3. Auerbach’s Concept of the Novel

VI. Milan Kundera’s Art of the Novel
1. European Cultural Heritage — 2. L’Art du roman — 3. Kundera’s Concept of the Novel

Closing Remarks
Bibliography

Parallel with the mythological vogue in contemporary art, late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century European literature virtually overflowed with texts based on the narrative treasurehouse of ancient mythology. After more than a millenium, poems and plays swarmed again with lascivious gods and death-defying heroes; burning desires and violent deaths; paederasty and incest; adultery, rape, and murder. With very few exceptions all the greatest authors of the day dedicated themselves to mythological pursuits, creating some of the most astonishing and significant but also hermetic works ever to have been written in the European languages. Indeed, this literary trend was both so consistent and so extensive that we may speak of a virtual early modern "mythological literature": a wide-branched organism of generically varied literary variations on the Ovidian fables. The book Diglossia. The Early Modern Reinvention of Mythological Discourse aims to answer the basic research questions: "Why did this mythological literature arise at this particular time?" and "What are its constants and variants?"


CONTENTS

MYTH
I. Mythological Literature – Topic, Theory, Method
The Topic — The Scholarship — This Book — A Cartography of Myth — The Map and the World
II. The Discourse of Myth – Antiquity, Middles Ages, Early Modern Period
The Beginning — The Phaedrus — Pagan Mythography after Plato — Christian Era — Early Modern Spain

DESIRE
I. Obscure Configurations of Desire – The Baroque Mythological Sonnet
Baroque Lyric and Myth — The Spanish Love Sonnet — Three Examples — Antinomies of Baroque Desire
II. Eros in Various Attires – Quevedo’s Hero and Leander Poems
Recurrence of a Myth — Quevedo’s Transformation of the Sonnet Genre — Myth of Love, Allegory of Lust — Ambiguous Figures of Desire

FICTION
I. Mirror of Myth – The Baroque Epyllion
The Baroque Mythological ‘Fable’ — A Controversial Genre — The Opinion of the Theorists — Fiction, Image, and Myth in the Baroque
II. A Monstruous Tale – Mosaical Mythography in Góngora’s Polifemo
Tradition and the Individual Work — The Polifemo, Epitome of the Genre — A Beautiful, Self-Reflective Beast — Poetic Mosaic

TRAGEDY
I. Ambiguous Allegories – The Baroque Mythological Comedia
The Double Bind — The Serious Comedia — Myth and Tragedy — Ambiguity Brought into Play — Culture of Crisis and Tragic Taboo
II. The Trappings of Woe – Myth, Tragedy, and Allegory in Calderón’s Eco y Narciso
Dramatic Amphibology — Echoes and Reflections — Tragedy à la Calderoniana — Fatality and Jokes — Profane Truth and Transcendental Illusion — The ‘Comic Tragedy’ in Context

LITERATURE
I. The Modern Turn – Beyond Desire, Fiction, and Tragedy
Parodic, Heroicomic, Jocoserious, Burlesque Myth — The Question of Modernity — Birth of the Literary Institution
II. The Promised Land of Letters – A European Perspective
An Aetiology of Diglossia: Venus and Adonis — Excursus to Andalucia — The Aporia of Myth: Amor and Psyche — Another Precarious Issue

English,
Professor Kluge’s examination of the Baroque marginalization of tragedy takes off from an analysis of the crucial role played by allegory in central fields of seventeenth-century culture such as political theory, education, mythography, literary criticism, and dramatic theory. The emergence of the term comedia as the generic designation of the drama is presented as intricately intertwined with the allegorical outlook dominating these fields, and, especially, as an effect of the ambiguous re-moralization of aesthetics that is also observable in the period’s famous literary feuds. The Baroque terminological development must consequently be seen as a central element in the highly equivocal contemporary revitalization of the Christian aesthetic tradition as a countermeasure to cultural decadence. As La vida es sueño shows, the serious comedia is eminently concerned with the transfiguration of the tragic in its various forms of historical pessimism and the ‘tragic view of life’, the moral tragedy of ‘neopagan’ secularism, and, not the least, ancient tragedy as an authoritative art form. However, although tragedy may be marginalized on a terminological level, it is by no means absent from the serious Baroque comedia, which is a tragicomic theatrum mundi rather than a comedy in the Aristotelian sense of the term.