Abstract
This chapter surveys the role of the New World, from 1492 to 1616, in both Cervantes's writing projects and his personal history. His novels respond to the events precipitated by Spain's ultramarine enterprise in startling ways. As cultural forms, these novels are engaged in a dialogue with a great ensemble of lived and fictional practices that we now call Spanish colonialism. This chapter reviews some of the promising twentieth-century research on Cervantes's reading – what he had access to, what he was indebted to – in the huge textual family of the Chronicles of the lndies, classified as a mass of texts covering Spain's exploration, conquest, and colonization of the Americas. The chapter ends with a biographical sketch of Cervantes's life, including his frustrated attempts to emigrate to America.
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