Don Quijote of La Mancha is the name of one of the most famous and read novels in the history of literature and it is also the name that its author, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, attributed to the central character of the story.
For those who do not know, it is worth clarifying that Don Quixote De la Mancha caused such a stir and influence in his time as a result of its totally demystifying content regarding the chivalric tradition.
Because precisely its protagonist, Don Quixote de la Mancha, belongs to the nobility but has neither the privileges nor the money that normally characterizes noblemen. Neither does he embody a brave and successful knight, but rather the opposite, almost all the deeds that “the hero” stars in end quite badly or at least not as expected…
Don Quixote is a fan of chivalric novels, he read dozens of them, and in his eagerness for them he went crazy, believing himself to be a knight from the Middle Ages.
Actually the real name of Don Quixote is Alonso Quijano but he is baptized as Quixote in that chivalrous delirium.
As a good knight has his faithful side, Sancho Panza, his horse Rocinante and the woman to whom he directs all his love, Doña Dulcinea del Toboso.
Cervantes’s book, then, deals precisely with the different adventures that Quijano leads, transformed into the medieval knight Don Quixote, and he does so from the most absolute humor and parody. This burlesque character with which Cervantes impregnated the entire work was the one that generated this break with classical literature, and the one that caused the work to be conceived as the first expression of modern literature.
The Quixote novel dates from the beginnings of the XVII centuryhis The first part of the ingenious gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha was published in 1605 and its continuation ten years later, in 1615, was entitled The ingenious gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha.,
The importance that this novel has had throughout its history, since its publication, was phenomenal. It ranks second after the Bible in terms of the books that achieved the most translations. Even in teaching it occupies a prominent place since it is a mandatory reading work in the field of literature in schools.
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