The Romantic Approach To 'Don Quixote': A Critical History Of The Romantic Tradition In 'Quixote' Criticism
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good to fair. Jacket: good, worn/faded (refer to image). Page Condition: Good - possible tanning. Markings: possible previous owner inscription.
At the heart of Western literary culture stands Cervantes' Don Quixote, a novel so rich and contradictory in its implications that each successive age has reinvented it entirely — and none more dramatically than the Romantics. Anthony Close's The Romantic Approach to 'Don Quixote' presents a rigorous and penetrating critical history of how Romantic-era thinkers transformed Cervantes' comic masterpiece into a vehicle for high philosophical seriousness, tracing the origins and evolution of this interpretive tradition from its eighteenth-century roots through to its enduring dominance in modern scholarship. Close argues with compelling force that the Romantic reading — which cast the Knight of La Mancha as a tragic idealist at war with a prosaic world — represents a profound misreading, one that has nonetheless shaped literary criticism for over two centuries. Writing with the precision of a Cambridge scholar and the conviction of a polemicist, he unpacks the aesthetic assumptions and cultural biases that allowed this mythology to calcify into received wisdom. The result is a work that does not merely chronicle a critical tradition but challenges the reader to question every assumption they hold about one of literature's most beloved and debated texts.
Author: Anthony Close
Format: Hardback
Genre: Literary theory
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good to fair. Jacket: good, worn/faded (refer to image). Page Condition: Good - possible tanning. Markings: possible previous owner inscription.
At the heart of Western literary culture stands Cervantes' Don Quixote, a novel so rich and contradictory in its implications that each successive age has reinvented it entirely — and none more dramatically than the Romantics. Anthony Close's The Romantic Approach to 'Don Quixote' presents a rigorous and penetrating critical history of how Romantic-era thinkers transformed Cervantes' comic masterpiece into a vehicle for high philosophical seriousness, tracing the origins and evolution of this interpretive tradition from its eighteenth-century roots through to its enduring dominance in modern scholarship. Close argues with compelling force that the Romantic reading — which cast the Knight of La Mancha as a tragic idealist at war with a prosaic world — represents a profound misreading, one that has nonetheless shaped literary criticism for over two centuries. Writing with the precision of a Cambridge scholar and the conviction of a polemicist, he unpacks the aesthetic assumptions and cultural biases that allowed this mythology to calcify into received wisdom. The result is a work that does not merely chronicle a critical tradition but challenges the reader to question every assumption they hold about one of literature's most beloved and debated texts.