Los ecos de Cervantes en la novela española de finales del siglo XX y principios del XXI

Laburpena

This doctoral thesis aims to analyse the presence of Cervantes' novelistic art in some significant examples of the current Spanish novel. For this purpose, we have taken a representative corpus of works published in Spain between 1975 and the present day. Likewise, we have chosen the concept of "echoes" for its capacity to encompass the multiplicity of forms in which the novelistic heritage of Cervantes has materialised, and we have taken Don Quixote as a touchstone for his most relevant contributions to the genre. Starting from the distinction between "Quixotic fictions" and "Cervantean novels", we use the latter category to determine the traces of Cervantes in the work of a series of authors, including Luis Landero, Javier Marías, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Carmen Martín Gaite, Enrique Vila-Matas, José María Merino, Marina Mayoral, Luis Mateo Díez or José Jiménez Lozano. These echoes can be found both in explicit allusions, references and homages and in a set of thematic and technical analogies that point to more or less conscious confluences. The profusion of literary resources that look to Cervantes' model (parody, metafictive reflection, hybridisation of genres, unreliable narrators, irony, etc.) and the variety of characters who struggle to overcome the constraints of everyday life with the flight of the imagination are at the centre of this analysis. The research has been carried out using a triple methodological approach: historical, as we seek to frame the works analysed as part of a Cervantine tradition of the novel; theoretical, since we use a conceptual apparatus that allows us to define precisely the type of literary links we establish (notions such as "intertextuality", "rewriting", "influences" or "complicity" are of particular relevance); and critical in terms of the analysis of the texts handled. The selection of the corpus of works is determined, in the first place, by the parameters of literary quality and representativeness. The novels are therefore critically acclaimed (through prizes and academic studies) and published by authors who are part of the current Hispanic literary canon. Secondly, the works have been selected on the basis of the verifiable existence of a series of significant affinities with Cervantes' novels. From the analysis we conclude that contemporary Spanish novelists' readings of Don Quixote update the universal values of the book and are, at the same time, a reflection of their own vital perceptions, their literary preferences and their conceptions of the novelistic genre. From all this we can infer both a series of particular interpretations and a set of literary constants which, in some aspects, contrast and, in others, continue the lines of previous readings. Thus, the survival of the Romantic reading is evident in the emphasis given to the character's nobility, madness and creative imagination, as well as the importance of the dream. However, there is a growing appreciation of comedy and humour as elements consubstantial to the Cervantine gaze that, for these writers, represent an exception to be vindicated in the Spanish literary tradition. At the same time, in the relevance given today to the interferences between life and literature (with the equalisation of both, and even the dominance of the latter over the former), fictional authors and unrealieble narrators, perspectivism, open structures, digression and interpolation, the parody of genres, the inclusion of literary criticism and the cultivation of a plain style rooted in orality, we recognise the main ways of connection with Cervantes' narrative art. Moreover, in relation to some of these aspects, Cervantes becomes a point of reference for these writers, inviting them to go beyond the model of the nineteenth-century novel.