Affective Geographies

By reading the works of Miguel de Cervantes through the history of emotion, this book defies a series of long-standing commonplaces about the author’s writing and the Mediterranean region at large.

Paul Michael Johnson is an associate professor of Hispanic Studies at DePauw University.

"This fascinating and original scholarly contribution to Early Modern literary studies – presented with an exquisite written expression – not only invites readers to reconsider many canonical works by Miguel de Cervantes, but also helps to lay the groundwork for a new direction of scholarly inquiry into a wide array of classical fiction."

María Antonia Garcés, Cornell University:

"Affective Geographies is a major contribution to research in both the field of Mediterranean Studies and emotion as a field of scholarly inquiry, particularly within the world of Cervantes studies. Paul Michael Johnson’s outstanding study represents literary history of the best kind: his scholarly text is also highly readable and engaging. Best of all, he is capable of balancing his serious scholarship with his imaginative insights in extremely elegant prose."

Diana de Armas Wilson, University of Denver:

"With clear and often elegant prose, Paul Michael Johnson’s battery of ideas about Cervantes are novel, captivating, scholarly, and endlessly engaging. Although this book addresses an audience of early modern scholars of Cervantes – and serves as a serious advance in state-of-the-art research – any reader wishing to learn about the workings of affect would benefit from it."

E. H. Friedman, Vanderbilt University:

"Johnson is adept at distinguishing the portrayal of the inwardness and interiority of Cervantine characters from counterparts in 19th-century European realism. A highlight of the volume—one of many—is discussion of the encounter, in part 2 of Don Quixote, of Sancho Panza and the Morisco Ricote as a source of commentary on humor. Analyzing feelings is a challenge. Johnson has done his homework and far more. His approach to the Mediterranean takes the reader all over the map of criticism, metacriticism, interdisciplinarity, and the Cervantine corpus."