TY - BOOK ID - 78138424 TI - Adventures in paradox : Don Quixote and the Western tradition PY - 2001 SN - 0271072237 9780271072234 0271020393 9780271020396 0271023643 9780271023649 PB - University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, DB - UniCat KW - Paradox in literature. KW - Paradoxes in literature KW - Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:78138424 AB - Cervantes’s Don Quixote confronts us with a series of enigmas that, over the centuries, have divided even its most expert readers: Does the text pursue a serious or comic purpose? Does it promote the truth of history and the untruth of fiction, or the truth of poetry and the fictiveness of truth itself? In a book that will revise the way we read and debate Don Quixote, Charles D. Presberg discusses the trope of paradox as a governing rhetorical strategy in this most canonical of Spanish literary texts. To situate Cervantes’s masterpiece within the centuries-long praxis of paradoxical discourse in the West, Presberg surveys its tradition in Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the European Renaissance. He outlines the development of paradoxy in the Spanish Renaissance, centering on works by Fernando de Rojas, Pero Mexía, and Antonio de Guevara. In his detailed reading of portions of Don Quixote, Presberg shows how Cervantes’s work enlarges the tradition of paradoxical discourse by imitating as well as transforming fictional and nonfictional models. He concludes that Cervantes’s seriocomic ";system"; of paradoxy jointly parodies, celebrates, and urges us to ponder the agency of discourse in the continued refashioning of knowledge, history, culture, and personal identity.This engaging book will be welcomed by literary scholars, Hispanisists, historians, and students of the history of rhetoric and poetics. ER -