Lives of a Poet as a Popular Hero: Cervantes' Fictional Biographies

Mančić, Aleksandra (2016) Lives of a Poet as a Popular Hero: Cervantes' Fictional Biographies. Književna istorija, 48 (159). pp. 209-234. ISSN 0350-6428

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Abstract

This essay explores a fictionalisation of the life of Miguel de Cervantes, which underwent translations from historiography to literature to film. Its focus is on the figure of the author rather than on the adaptations of his literary opus, and it offers re-enactments of two closely intertwined processes: that of literary creation and that of the cultural construction of the image of the artist, in retrospect, as a historic figure and a cultural icon. This seems a particularly appropriate perspective in the case of Cervantes, who has been vindicated, reinvented, and re-introduced as a creator of an emblematic figure and a foundational myth of free thought: Don Quixote. The examples of Bruno Frank’s novel Cervantes (1934) and its filmic adaptation in Vincent Sherman’s film Cervantes/Young Rebel (1967) are situated in particular political and social circumstances in which each one was made: the question of mediamorphosis from literary to cinematic expression is explored as a socially contextualised translation between arts.

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