La novela de Cervantes y las primeras novelas picarescas

Abstract

Starting from the double premises that Cervantes was both a writer and a literary critic with portentous knowledge of the literary genres -which led him to examine the historicity of the genres he worked with on a meta-discursive level- The article at hand defines his concept of the novel by highlighting its most significant features. Each novel is scrutinized individually, emphasizing on the origin and evolution of the genre which it is associated to, by contrasting it to the picaresque novel in order to analyse Cervantes' position in regard to the poetics of the picaresque genre during its institutional phase.