About the literary genre of Quixote

Abstract

This essay aims to discuss the question of Quixote’s gender. We know that this is a commonplace, in books of criticism and literary history, the generic application of the label “first modern novel” to Cervantes’ ultimate creation; in view of this, the question arises: does this classification hold? Although we understand this designation as imprecise, we don’t intend to exhaustively refute all the limitations that this type of categorization imposes on the understanding of the text, but only to problematize the subject, in view of the undeniable fact that the novel modern has absorbed various techniques from the Cervantes’ text. After a brief comment on the history of the interpretation of the text, we will go through the terminological question and try to observe, from the context in which the novel emerged and from some of its caracteristics, whether this nomenclature can be applied to the work of the Spanish master.