El Curioso Impertinente or how to write novels according to Cervantes

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to find out and describe both the doctrinal guidance and the ultimate meaning of the novel of El curioso impertinente, interspersed in the First Part of Quixote: how Cervantes understood the way of writing novels. The preceptistic sense of the first delivery of the work, centered on the thesis of theoretical and literary aspects typical of Mannerist classicism and in syntony with the exegetical works of Francisco de Herrera and El Brocense, is undoubtedly shown thoughtout this work in the role played by the authority of Aristotle and Ovid´s amatory work of. Everything, leading ideas and literary action, is a bookish creation, book also born from other books. The founder of the novel, who was admired by the 19th century realist writers, inspired himself and based his creations from the reading of different books. He also exposed his recipe to the world, his rules of narrative art, because “art” or “techné”, inherited from Antiquity, could not be wholy understood without them in his age.

Keywords: Cervantes, Aristotle, Ovid, novel, dialectic, amatory poetry, Greco-Latin literary sources