Narrative and Bibliographic "Reality" in Don Quixote

In Part II of Don Quixote, the titular character walks into a printing press and reads his own story. In this scene, Cervantes blends the fictitious “reality” of his hero with the physical reality of the printed word.  On one hand, the “reality” or interpretation of the Don Quixote narrative is a constructed that has been defined by its readers and the societies they have lived in.  On the other hand, Don Quixote the text has a very concrete reality: numerous books with different material characteristics and different illustrations that have been circulated in a multitude of ways.  By borrowing from the many literary “genres and...debates of his day” (Friedman 179), Cervantes created a work that has produced much discussion and many reimaginings.  Over the past 400 years, how has the relationship between the conceptual “reality” of Don Quixote and the physical reality of its publications changed and evolved?   In what instances has the text been produced to evoke a specific conception or meaning of the tale, and in what instances have conceptual interpretations of Don Quixote conflicted with the materiality of the text at the time?  In what ways did Cervantes’ initial construction of the narrative help spawn many these physical and imagined interpretations?

Work Cited

Friedman, Edward H. “Don Quixote and Its Range of Audiences.”  Approaches to Teaching Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Ed. James A. Parr and Lisa Vollendorf. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2015. 178–184. Print.