Enamoured Knight

by Douglas Glover

Overview

This book is filled with passion and love for the art of writing and is a celebration of reading. Through the prism of the great Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky, Douglas Glover provides a scrupulous reading of Cervantes's Don Quixote, opening this 400-year-old Spanish masterpiece to a new generation of readers, showing how Cervantes made his novel, and, finally, revealing how we as readers participate in his magic creation. Glover's brilliant accomplishment resides in his ability to seduce the reader with his own stunning prose and penetrating insight, while also creating the means for anyone to see into Cervantes's genius.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781564784049
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	11/28/2005
Series:	Dalkey Archive Scholarly Series
Pages:	191
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.54(h) x 0.59(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

William Kennedy, the author of "Ironweed", has called Douglas Glover "a very astute literary mind and an excellent writer . . . a writer of substance," and Philip Marchand has called him "one of the most important Canadian writers of his generation." Even though he is always working outside the box, his books have gained acclaim from the most attentive critics. "A Guide to Animal Behaviour" was a finalist for the Governor General#'s Award; H.J. Kirchoff selected "The Life and Times of Captain N." as a "Globe and Mail" top-ten paperback of 2001; and "16 Categories of Desire" was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Award for Fiction. Douglas Glover is a Canadian itinerant. He grew up on the family tobacco farm in southwestern Ontario, studied philosophy at York Universityand the University of Edinburgh, then worked on a series of daily newspapers in New Brunswick, Ontario, Quebec and Saskatchewan before earning his MFA at the Iowa Wri

Editorial Reviews

a wonderful tour of critical perspectives on Don Quixote' -Quill & Quire

Dalkey Archive Press

From the Publisher

Cervantes's great novel, Don Quixote, has drawn the attention of writers such as Nabokov (who called it cruel) and Dostoyevski (who famously declared it "the saddest book ever written"). In this testament to his love of Cervantes's work, Glover, a novelist and short story writer (Elle), offers an entirely sympathetic reading, in which no criticism (even Nabokov's) can withstand the claim of Cervantes's genius. The book's weakness lies in its structure: Glover can't seem to decide whether he wanted to write a book about literature and reading in which Don Quixote is the exemplar, or a treatment of Don Quixote that glances at literary theory along the way. As a result, his thesis never really coheres, and the reader is bombarded with extraneous descriptions of the many forms of humor available to a writer and the different ways to identify the novel form itself, from realist to romantic to "easy going." Still, the book contains beautiful insights into the characters and methods that animate both Don Quixote and the writing (and reading) experience, from the claim that Cervantes challenged the very notion of realism in fiction to observations about the ways in which desire functions in the production of all novels. (Nov. 10) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Four centuries after its publication, Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605) remains the literary windmill to break the critical theorist's lance. Glover (writing, Vermont Coll.; The Life and Times of Captain N) approaches Cervantes's Spanish masterpiece as the novelist and short story writer that he is to examine the essential roots of fiction writing and the many faces of the Don as well as how leading critical interpretations stand up against what is thought to be the first modern novel. This slim but ambitious study provides readable capsule summaries of all recent theories, including Glover's own "night thoughts of an insomniac reader." Cervantes, Glover notes, continually juggled elements of fiction with self-awareness, playing on his readers' expectations to create and mock the novel's sentimental plot and characters. For this reason and others, Glover considers that Cervantes remains the most contemporary of authors and believes that his novel, like all its successors, "teach[es] us to be real." Recommended for general and specialized collections.-Shelley Cox, formerly with Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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