Cervantes' Persiles and the Travails of Romance

This collection of original essays presents new ways of looking at Cervantes’ final novel. Persiles , a work that engages with geopolitical models of race, ethnicity, nation, and religion, takes its inspiration from the highly influential Ethiopian Story (the Aithiopika) of Heliodorus. With particular relevance to the period, the  Persiles questions the issue of cultural pluralism in the Spanish empire and emphasizes the need to rethink the radically altered category of lo bárbaro/the barba