El quijote y la melancolía

Abstract

This artcle investgates Cervantes' masterpiece's inaugural character in modern literature. To do so, we explore the concept of melancholy, central to the Quixote, and argue that this concept can be understood as a structural generator of the modern literary work. The analysis is first performed in the ideological and historical context of the time of Cervantes, the "melancholic age", then moving on to study the way in which Cervantes has internalised this "objectve melancholy" in his constructon of the character of Don Quixote and of the literary work itself. Thirdly, Cervantes' originality is located in a more general ontological history of melancholy, which discovers in it an important key to the archaeology of the present. © 2013 CSIC.