Disenchantment, Skepticism, and the Early Modern Novel in Spain and France

This volume examines five early modern novels from the seventeenth century in Spain and France as examples of literature as a form of skeptical inquiry: Cervantes’s Don Quijote , Zayas’s Desengaños amorosos , Scarron’s Roman comique , Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’Autre Monde , and Mme. de Lafayette’s Zayde . These early modern novels encourage readers to take a critical stance toward accepted beliefs, through content that stages multiple encounters with the shockingly unfamiliar as well as through exp