Refiguring Authority: Reading, Writing, and Rewriting in Cervantes

In this wide-ranging study E. Michael Gerli shows how Cervantes and his contemporaries ceaselessly imitated one another—glossing works, dismembering and reconstructing them, writing for and against one another—while playing sophisticated games of literary one-upmanship.

The result was that literature in late Renaissance Spain was often more than a simple matter of source and imitation. It must be understood as a far more subtle, palimpsest-like process of forging endless series of texts from...