What is the role of literature in the formation of the state? Anthony J. Cascardi takes up this fundamental question in Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics, a comprehensive analysis of the presence of politics in Don Quixote. Cascardi argues that when public speech is constrained, as it was in seventeenth-century Spain, politics must be addressed through indirect forms including comedy, myth, and travellers' tales.
Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics convincingly re-engages the ancient roots of political theory in modern literature by situating...