Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature

Extract

Perhaps it is Mikhail bakhtin's definition of the novel as an internally dialogized form of discourse that most usefully helps to discriminate between forms of narrative with a view to tracing something like a genealogy of the novel in the Iberian Peninsula. Nearly every other criterion seems inadequate. For instance, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's famous insertion of literary criticism in the second part of Don Quixote (1605, 1615)—which Carlos Fuentes deemed the mark of the genre's modernity—hinges on self-re-flexivity and thus on the distinction between realism and fantasy (see science fiction ), but only retrospectively did literary histories associate this “realist” work with the emergence of a new genre called “novel.” Cervantes merely distinguished between good and bad books, qualifying his statements by employing contemporary criteria of style as well as plausibility. There is no point in sketching a précis of the history of the various Iberian literatures in the vernacular, which is something that only ignorance would attempt. Nor is it possible to outline long-term trends without great vagueness. The novel is a genre with many species and individuals. But, short of formulating a synthesis, it is possible, I believe, to recognize—in the various degrees of reality and fantasy, of object-directed and consciousness-directed discourse that make the long history of Iberian ... log in or subscribe to read full text