Two sets of related issues prompt this study: the birth of the New World in European consciousness and the rise of the Cervantine novel in Spain. The first full-length study to move beyond an inventory of Cervantes's references to the Indies--to Mexico and Peru, cannibals and tobacco, parrots and alligators--this book interprets his novels as a transatlantic, cross-cultural, and multi-linguistic achievement.

• Introduction


• 1: The Americanist Cervantes


• 2: The Novel about the Novel


• 3: The Novel as 'Moletta': Cervantes and Defoe


• 4: Some Versions of Hybridity: cacao and Potosí


• 5: 'Scorpion Oil': The Books of Chivalry


• 6: Islands in the Mind: Utopography


• 7: Jewels in the Crown: The Colonial War Epic


• 8: Remembrance of Things Lost: Ethnohistory


• Conclusion


• Bibliography


• Index

Diana de Armas Wilson is Professor of English and Renaissance Studies, University of Denver