Don Quixote is among the most influential novels ever written. It explores the shifting boundaries of truth and illusion. The author is a narrator who self-consciously narrates and makes us constantly aware of his presence and is preoccupied with literary criticism and theory. With his post-modernist tendencies he has become a novelist's novelist par excellence.

Often called the first modern novel, Don Quixote originally conceived as a comic satire against the chivalric romances. However, Cervantes did not destroy the chivalric ideal of the romances he rejected - he transfigured it. The works have been seen as a veiled attack on the Catholic Church or on the contemporary Spanish politics, or symbolizing the duality of the Spanish character.

Neither wholly tragedy nor wholly comedy Don Quixote gives a panoramic view of the 17th-century Spanish society. Central characters are the elderly, idealistic knight, who sets out on his old horse Rosinante to...
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