The Man Who Invented Fiction
How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World
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The Man Who Invented Fiction
Narrated by:
Matt Fletcher-Macdonald
Pre-order Now for £21.99
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Narrated by:
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Matt Fletcher-Macdonald
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By:
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William Egginton
In the early seventeenth century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain’s wars against the Ottoman Empire published a book. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from reading too many books of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. That book, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in human history. Cervantes did more than just publish a bestseller, though. He invented a way of writing. This book is about how Cervantes came to create what we now call fiction, and how fiction changed the world.
The Man Who Invented Fiction explores Cervantes’s life and the world he lived in, showing how his influences converged in his work, and how his work--especially Don Quixote--radically changed the nature of literature and created a new way of viewing the world. Finally, it explains how that worldview went on to infiltrate art, politics, and science, and how the world today would be unthinkable without it.
Four hundred years after Cervantes’s death, William Egginton has brought thrilling new meaning to an immortal novel.©2016 William Egginton (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
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Critic reviews
A heroic history of novel-reading itself.
The tale of Cervantes himself is told with impressive acuity, thoroughness and exactitude by Egginton in his uncommonly full and readable book about genius.
A revered classic here becomes strikingly new again.
Egginton shines in his literary analysis, teasing out Cervantes’s genius in accessible prose and showing how Don Quixote paved the way for modern fiction by exploring its characters’ inner lives . . . An entertaining and thought-provoking reading of Cervantes’s masterpiece.
A celebration of a beloved novel and its innovative author . . . Egginton's well-informed history of 16th-century Spanish life, politics, and culture makes for an engrossing read.
William Egginton has written an engaging and enlightening book on the pivotal role of Miguel de Cervantes in the development of western literature. He amply justifies the truth of his wonderfully provocative title. (Edith Grossman, renowned translator of, among other Spanish language masterpieces, DON QUIXOTE)
A poignant account of Don Quixote . . . The Man Who Invented Fiction is a worthy memorial to the eternal achievement that Cervantes wrought out of his own suffering and hard-won wisdom. (Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities, Yale University, and author of THE WESTERN CANON)
As this book shows us, Cervantes doesn’t simply predate our idea of fiction; he conditions it, gives it form, makes it possible. In this sense, the present book can be understood as a genealogy of the literary imagination and its suffering father… An entertaining, intelligent, solidly documented study. (Andrés Neuman, novelist, author of TRAVELLER OF THE CENTURY, winner of the Alfaguara Prize)
Did Cervantes truly invent fiction? William Egginton argues persuasively that the publication of Don Quixote in 1605 has transformed the way people have read, written, and thought ever since -- after all, the Knight of the Mournful Countenance has beguiled admirers as diverse as Descartes, Hume, Marx, Borges, and Graham Greene. Like Don Quixote, The Man Who Invented Fiction is an inspirational adventure story. (Ingrid D. Rowland, Professor of Architecture, University of Notre Dame, and author of GIORDANO BRUNO: PHILOSOPHER/HERETIC)
The Man Who Invented Fiction weaves a compelling tapestry of adventures in reading. Told with great panache, William Egginton’s presentation combines a unique understanding of Cervantes’s life, art, times, and the cultural debates that shaped his revolutionary fiction. It is essential reading. (Marina S. Brownlee, Robert Schirmer Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, and author of THE POETICS OF LITERARY THEORY IN LOPE AND CERVANTES)
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