About this item
In the early seventeenth century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a book. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from reading too many books of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. That book, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in human history. Cervantes did more than just publish a bestseller, though. He invented a way of writing. This book is about how Cervantes came to create what we now call fiction, and how fiction changed the world. The Man Who Invented Fiction explores Cervantes's life and the world he lived in, showing how his influences converged in his work, and how his work--especially Don Quixote--radically changed the nature of literature and created a new way of viewing the world. Finally, it explains how that worldview went on to infiltrate art, politics, and science, and how the world today would be unthinkable without it. Four hundred years after Cervantes's death, William Egginton has brought thrilling new meaning to an immortal novel.
About the Author
William Egginton is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches on Spanish and Latin American literature, literary theory, and the relation between literature and philosophy. He is the author of How the World Became a Stage (2003) , Perversity and Ethics (2006) , A Wrinkle in History (2007) , The Philosopher's Desire (2007) , The Theater of Truth (2010) , and In Defense of Religious Moderation (2011) . He is also co-editor with Mike Sandbothe of The Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy (2004) , translator of Lisa Block de Behar's Borges, the Passion of an Endless Quotation (2003, 2nd edition 2014) , and co-editor with David E. Johnson of Thinking With Borges (2009) . His most recent book is The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered In the Modern World (2016) .
