Enamoured Knight

by Douglas Glover

Book Overview

This book is filled with passion and love for the art of writing and is a celebration of reading. Through the prism of the great Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky, Douglas Glover provides a scrupulous reading of Cervantes's Don Quixote, opening this 400-year-old Spanish masterpiece to a new generation of readers, showing how Cervantes made his novel, and, finally, revealing how we as readers participate in his magic creation. Glover's brilliant accomplishment...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1564784045
• ISBN13: 9781564784049
• Release Date: November 2005
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Length: 191 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.4"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

The Invention of Plot

This book got me to taking Cervantes down off the shelf and blowing the dust off the covers. I did not have the translation that Douglas Glover recommends, the Smollett translation from the 1750s, so I might have missed some of his particular points. Contrary to the Publishers Weekly claims, I thought that Glover had pretty much written a book about DON QUIXOTE that along the way examines literary trends in the USA and Canada. He shows us that, while Hemingway once explained that all of American literature grows out of HUCKLEBERRY FINN, au contraire, even HUCKLEBERRY FINN (and other literary texts, disparate as MANSFIELD PARK and HEART OF DARKNESS) are mere re-writings of the "enamoured knight," just turned around on its side one way or another, with point of view shifted about. Austen's novel, claims Glover, is DON QUIXOTE re-told from the POV of Aldonza Lorenzo. Not that perhaps she consciously modelled her writing after Cervantes, just that she couldn't help echoing the Renaissance masterpiece because, as it happens, it contains everything like some Whitmanic talisman of "all-ness." Glover is most amusing and animated when he discusses what he calls the "invention of plot," which just so happens to have occurred right in the middle of Cervantes' struggles with making his hero come alive. Previous "novels" had depended on mere repetition, so that the ARABIAN NIGHTS is nothing more than short story after short story, enjambed in an awkward if ingenious fashion by thinking of Scheherezade as a linking device. Or Boccaccio, or THE CANTERBURY TALES--little stories bumping up against each other. But "plot" as we know it shows its true colors halfway through the fifth chapter of DON QUIXOTE. Glover is an engaging lecturer and a well-read man. I haven't read many of Dalkey Archives' critical books, but if this is a good example of them, I'll order some more and be done with it. Funny however that this one book seems to celebrate the invention of plot, while many other of Dalkey's titles, including Glover's own, have labored mightily to defeat such contrivance and plot's hegemony in mainstream fiction. Just saying.

A creative literary treatment of Cervantes' classic novel "Don Quixote"

A strongly recommended read, The Enamoured Knight by Douglas Glover is a creative literary treatment of Cervantes' classic novel "Don Quixote". Among the chapters of The Enamoured Knight, the reader will find numerous additional pages of analysis and perspectives on the many angles and possible meanings of Cervantes' metaphors in what is arguably one of the most important classics of western literature. The Enamoured Knight opens new doors to the four-hundred-year old complex literary masterpiece, "Don Quixote" and is very highly recommended reading, especially for students of Spanish literature.