Novel Friendships and Community in Cervantes’s “Don Quixote”

Novel Friendships and Community in Cervantes’s “Don Quixote” analyzes Don Quixote through the critical lens of friendship studies. Turning a critical spotlight on the friendship between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, this book examines the formation, growth, and dynamics of their friendship as the nucleus of the first modern novel in the West and the source of the work’s enduring power. Novel Friendships also examines the theme of amity in relation to the evolving concept of community as a throughline in Cervantes’s fiction—before, during, and after Don Quixote. This book shows the power of the arts, especially storytelling, to build friendships and foster community, and highlights how Cervantes deploys fiction to cultivate his readers’ sense of friendship and to create a community of readers. Novel Friendships suggests that today’s readers may find Cervantes’s views on amity and community highly relevant to the contemporary world.