Classical Literature as Cervantes’ Creative Force versus the Apocryphal Don Quixote

Abstract

The article analyzes the important role of Greco-Latin literature in Cervantes in comparison with Avellaneda’s apocryphal Don Quixote. With the masterful integration, transformation and adaptation of the cultural heritage of Greece and Rome to his own way of making literature, the writer from Alcalá invites us to reflect on themes that also occupied a preferential place in the immortal works of Antiquity, which in his hands are not limited to being a mere library of contrived resources, a sterile reference of faded and stuffy erudition, as is the case with his rival, but are intimately fused with the very essence of the work.