"Don Quixote" and the Poetics of the Novel

In response to the classic question whether Don Quixote is true to life, Felix Martinez-Bonati defines it as an unrealistic allegory of realism. He maintains that Cervantes's novel presents an ironized universe of literature that plays with the contradictions of traditional wisdom and the variety and limitations of literary forms—including those of verisimilitude. Drawing on Aristotle's Poetics , on the idealist and romantic traditions that originate in Kant, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, and Cole