Abstract
One of the most influential books to appear in our time on the history of the novel is The Rise of the Novel by Ian Watt.1 Watt's book placed that rise in the land of Defoe and Fielding; consequently, since 1957 hispanists have been raising their voices, more in anger than in sorrow. More recently, historians of literature as well as novelists have increasingly come to agree with the protesters.2 So we hispanists can now look back with satisfaction, knowing that the abducted infant genre, the novel, has finally been restored to its rightful parent, like the heroines of La gitanilla and of La ilustre fregona. Our story has a happy ending, as all such stories should. Our champions have returned with the prize, and the prize is the bright, shining clich6 which says that Cervantes is the father of the modern novel. After so happy and so providential a conclusion, it would surely be unmannerly not to bask in the steady glow of that cliche. Even so, some scholars, have puzzled and debated over its authenticity: is Don Quixote really a novel? What should be the appropriate generic description, not only of Don Quixote, but of all the various prose works of Cervantes? Should they be classified as novel or as romance?
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