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An analysis of several important discourses in Cervantes'sLa Numanciademonstrates the playwright's detailed knowledge of the art of rhetoric in the classical tradition. Cervantes employs rhetoric to characterize his fictional creations in the play, especially Scipio, the Roman commander, and the Numantine women. Further, by allowing the Numantine women a voice in the town's deliberations, Cervantes signals the possibility and potential of rhetoric as a means of civic discourse in his own time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, digressiveness in the novel has become a trendy topic in literary studies. Research on the English novel has acknowledged the relevance of digressiveness in early Modern prose fiction. Conversely, Hispanists have presented the Spanish digressive novel as a postmodernist achievement, having only the Spanish predecessors of Miguel de Cervantes's Persiles y Sigismunda (1617) and Coloquio de los perros (1613). These Hispanists regard Sterne and non-Spanish modernists as the great pioneers of the digressive novel. This article argues that the roots of the Spanish digressive novel are to be found in sixteenth-century Spain, most notably in Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache (1599–1604) but also in the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and in Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605–15). It also vindicates the digressive nature of the works of Spanish Modernists such as Azorín (pseudonym of José Martínez Ruiz) and Miguel de Unamuno. Guzmán is here presented as the first great Spanish digressive novel, and Unamuno's Cómo se hace una novela (1927) as the Spanish digressive novel par excellence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author argues that postmodern, ecofeminist, and ecopsychological critiques of mainstream modernity are clearly anticipated by several early modern writers. In fact, they, among others, may be taken to represent the second, or self-critical, tendency in modernity. Michel de Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, and Molière all seem to recognize what Pierre Bourdieu has argued explicitly: the "world" made available by representations for supposedly objective cognition is not the world we actually inhabit, but it can disastrously replace that world, which is the only one wherein we can survive. The represented world is a network of merely symbolic relationships and exchanges, into which only delusive versions of the self and the real can be incorporated. The writers looked at here denounce the suffocating proliferation of artifacts and representations, the dangerous craving for certainty, and the delusive detachment of mind from matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]