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The article explores the portrayal of comic characters in Miguel de Cervantes's novel Don Quijote de la Mancha. It discusses how Cervantes challenged the prevailing norms of his time by investing fundamentally comic characters with dignity and particularity. The article highlights the cultural context in which genres were defined by the opposition of high and low content and characters. It also discusses the complex character development and psychological depth of Don Quijote and Sancho Panza, as well as the use of scatological humor in the novel. The author argues that understanding the comedic elements of Don Quijote is crucial for a full appreciation of the novel and emphasizes the characters' contribution to the development of liberalism. [Extracted from the article]

This article provides a comprehensive overview of the novel Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes. It explores the different interpretations of the novel throughout history, ranging from a comedic work to a reflection of Spanish society and a critique of feudalism. The article also discusses the influence of José Ortega y Gasset's Meditaciones del Quijote and the socio-political and economic analyses of scholars such as José Antonio Maravall and Pierre Vilar. The author, Eric Clifford Graf, argues that the novel celebrates bourgeois capitalism and personal liberty, drawing inspiration from the School of Salamanca and classical liberal thinkers. The text includes responses from other scholars who either challenge or expand upon Graf's arguments. [Extracted from the article]

The interpolated stories included in Don Quijote, Part one have frequently been studied as oppositional to the main plot in function of thematic binaries such as literature-life, illusion-reality, truth-fiction, idealism-realism and romance-novel. An analysis of the embedded tales' shared motifs, commonplace characterizations and structural relationship with the central narration, however, demonstrates Cervantes's attempt to incorporate and harmonize disparate literary elements into a single narrative according to the theoretical precepts of his age, especially unity-in-variety, admiratio and verisimilitude. The interpolated stories are constructed as symmetrical patterns of recurrent tropes and themes with varying degrees of coordination with each other, as well as with the main plot. This intricate structure demonstrates the incremental nature of Cervantes's innovation. Rather than constituting a decisive rupture with contemporary theoretical postulates, as the critical consensus holds, his approach to narrative and character develops in consonance with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]