Don Quixote

A novel by Miguel de Cervantes about an aging man who imagines himself a knight-errant and sets out on adventures with Sancho Panza. Its comic collisions between idealism and reality make it a landmark of modern fiction.

Windmills: Windmills are machines that use sails to convert wind into rotational power. Quixote mistakes their sails for the arms of giants and attacks them.
Unreliable narrator: An unreliable narrator is a narrator whose account cannot be accepted as fully accurate or trustworthy. The novel’s competing sources and narratorial asides complicate certainty about its story.
Miguel de Cervantes: Miguel de Cervantes was a Spanish writer best known for creating Don Quixote. His experiences and literary choices shaped the novel’s comic, self-conscious form.
Modern novel: The modern novel is a long prose narrative form marked by diverse characters, social settings, and flexible storytelling. Don Quixote’s self-conscious narration and changing perspectives helped expand the form.
Dulcinea del Toboso: Dulcinea del Toboso is the idealized lady whom Don Quixote serves as his imagined knightly beloved. His devotion transforms a real peasant woman into a figure of courtly romance.
Metafiction: Metafiction is fiction that draws attention to its own status as an invented work. Characters encounter accounts of their own earlier adventures and react to them.
Amadís de Gaula: Amadís de Gaula is a Spanish chivalric romance about the adventures of a knight and his beloved. It was a celebrated model of the knightly literature Quixote imitates.
Quixotism: Quixotism is impractical idealism pursued despite evidence that circumstances resist it. The protagonist’s name came to describe a characteristic conflict between ideals and reality.
The inn in Don Quixote: An inn is a lodging house for travelers, often providing food and stabling. Quixote mistakes an inn for a castle and its innkeeper for a lord.
Chivalric romance: Chivalric romance is a medieval and early modern narrative genre centered on knights, quests, and courtly love. Quixote models his identity and expectations on the books of this genre.

Linked from 27 pages