Don Quixote and the End of Knight Literature

Abstract

Don Quixote, one of the most famous figures in world literature, was a humanist under the illusion about chivalry. This paradoxical figure combined tragic fate with comedic flavor. A chronic comment on Don Quixote by Cervantes was that it ended knight literature and started neoteric river novel. Although in the preface of this novel, Cervantes stated that his purpose of writing was to overthrow the medieval knight story, he actually held a complicated attitude toward medieval knight novel-satirized the old form of medieval knight story and discloses evil and corruption of the society, taking stereotypical chivalry as his carrier for burgeoning humanism.