Miguel de Cervantes is the greatest writer of the Spanish Golden Age and his influence on the Spanish language and subsequent literature has been profound. Readers who know Cervantes only as
the author of Don Quote will be surprised and delighted by what they find in the Novelas ejemplares, published in 1613. Don Quote may be the most celebrated novel in western literature, but the
Novelas ejemplares are among its most unjustly neglected masterpieces. The collection consists of twelve long short stories or short novels, each quite unlike the others. The geographical
contrast alone could not be sharper, with settings ranging from the Aegean to the Caribbean and from Britain to North Africa. The stories teem with characters drawn from an equally broad social
spectrum, from the new, affluent nobility to self-made merchants, feisty women, confidence tricksters, criminals and excluded minorities. None of the major fictional genres of Cervantes’s time
is missing from the rich mix of literary allusion designed to appeal to a well-read, metropolitan audience.
The Novelas ejemplares are a narrative tour de force, an exhibition of sophisticated story-telling, daringly original in concept, executed with subtlety and imagination, wide-ranging,
entertaining and amusing, to be read for pleasure as well as profit. Taken together, they provide an overview of many of Cervantes’s recurring themes û the complexity of human nature and the
unpredictability of human behaviour.
A modern English version of the whole collection was not available until the publication of these translations, produced by a team of translators, in four volumes, in 1992. Now for the first
time all twelve stories are collected in one volume. For this second, fully updated edition Barry Ife’s authoritative General Introduction has been re-written and more of the important original
preliminaries have been edited and translated so that the reader has a greater sense of the context of the 1613 publication.
Professor Barry Ife CBE is Cervantes Professor Emeritus at King’s College London and Principal of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. He has written many books and articles on Spanish
literature and culture from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries.
Jonathan Thacker is Fellow and Tutor in Spanish at Merton College, Oxford; he specialises in Spanish Golden Age drama and is the author of various books, articles and translations including A
Companion to Spanish Golden Age Theatre (2007). He is Series Editor of Aris & Phillips Hispanic Classics.
