Cervantes the Poet

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.