Cervantes’ Architectures

Cervantes' Architectures uncovers and examines the countless architectures found in Cervantes’ prose fiction.

Frederick A. de Armas is Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago..

"Cervantes’ ellipsis and transformations of architecture urge us to revisit Baroque fictions of Spain as a necessary task to survive the uncertainties of climate change, the fear of the pandemic, and the claustrophobic months and years in our dwellings."

Hilaire Kallendorf, Professor of Hispanic and Religious Studies, Texas A&M University:

"Since he has started writing novels himself, de Armas’ scholarship has become even more creative. It takes a novelist to truly understand the inner workings of a novelist’s mind. This book’s brilliance is matched only by its timeliness. De Armas has taken the subjective experience of being shut in during the pandemic and transformed it into a fantastic mental tour of the buildings dotting the map of Cervantes’ architectural landscape."

Mercedes Alcalá-Galán, Professor of Spanish, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and President of the Cervantes Society of America:

"Cervantes’ Architectures opens up a critical field never explored before, revealing how architectural space in Cervantes is dynamically integral to the poetics of his oeuvre. In this groundbreaking study, de Armas brings together his unsurpassed sensibility for art and ekphrasis and a deeply intuitive sense of the meaning of inhabitable places, imaginary and real, grandiose and humble, that avows the profound symbiosis between architecture and being human in Cervantes’ literary fiction."

William Worden, Associate Professor of Spanish, University of Alabama:

"From looming towers to imagined castles to actual prisons, Cervantes’ Architectures explores the diverse structures that abound in La Galatea, Don Quixote, and Persiles y Sigismunda. De Armas draws on Vitruvius’ treatise on architecture, Renaissance artworks, the life of Cervantes, and modern theories of space and place to offer us new and fascinating ways to consider the multitudinous architectures constructed in Cervantine prose."