Cervantine Perversity - Gender, Violence, and Sexuality

This volume offers a bold re-examination of the representation of women in the work of Miguel de Cervantes by highlighting the role of perversity. Bringing together historicist, psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer perspectives, the essays analyze how Cervantes’ narratives construct scenes of sexual violence, objectification, and female suffering while perversely inviting the reader’s complicity in their consumption. Through readings of Don Quijote, the Novelas ejemplares, and other works, contributors challenge the long-standing view of Cervantes as a proto-feminist author. Instead, they reveal how his fiction often transforms women’s vulnerability into narrative spectacle, exposing the troubling dynamics of power, gender, and pleasure embedded in the Cervantine aesthetic.