Carroll B. Johnson – författare

In this innovative revisiting of Don Quixote and the Novelas ejemplares, Carroll B. Johnson investigates in detail the cultural and material environment in which Cervantes placed his characters.  Cervantes and the Material World reveals a recurrent preoccupation with the clash of two different economic systems: a reenergized feudalism and an incipient capitalism. Overturning the common assumption that Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and myriad other colorful characters carry out their adventures in a timeless social milieu, Johnson demonstrates how their perspectives and experiences are shaped by the events and crises of their immediate historical context.  Johnson examines how questions of the distribution of wealth, the ownership of the means of production, and membership in one or another economic order permeate Cervantes's fiction. Thoughtfully contextualizing key excerpts, he suggests how business activities, legal codes, and other materialist practices actively impinge on the lives of the characters, influencing and in some cases determining their motivations and their possibilities for action.  A major study that will change the face of Cervantes scholarship, Cervantes and the Material World is also an important resource for students of the Spanish Golden Age and Renaissance and baroque literature and culture.

The essays in this collection represent the first effort in Hispanism to address the conflicted status of Cervantes studies by interrogating the possibility of continued critical dialogue in the context of postmodern theories that threaten to divide into oppositional discourses. Comprising broad historical overviews as well as close readings of texts, and wielding the rhetoric of scientific detachment and of impassioned political commitments, the essays at once exemplify and critique multiple critical positions. The collection takes a meaningful and timely look at the formation of cervantismo from the early twentieth century to the prevailing debates on postmodernism and the current crisis of literary studies.