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Article: Cervantes, Miguel De (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra; 1547–1616)
- Article from:
- Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World
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CERVANTES, MIGUEL DE (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra; 1547
–
1616)
CERVANTES, MIGUEL DE
(Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra; 1547
–
1616), Spanish novelist, dramatist, and poet. Cervantes is known especially for his novel
Don Quixote
(1605; 1615). Read largely as a funny book in Cervantes's time, the Romantics and their later brethren were to focus on Don Quixote's pathos and his quest for impossible dreams. The madman who tilted at windmills and read the world in accordance with the conventions of books of chivalry was to become a symbol of spiritual values and, in the case of Spain, the embodiment of a national ethos (Close, p. 246). Don Quixote has been called "the classic and ...