Don Quixote’s Impossible Quest for the Absolute in Literature: Fiction, Reflection, and Negative Theology (Routledge Studies in Latin American and Iberian Literature)

This book offers a reading particularly of Part II of Don Quixote, a reading that is embedded in a philosophical reflection on the revelation of religious truth in and through literature.Part II of Don Quixote is the far richer part for its meta-literary reflection on the novel itself as a genre and on life as such seen through the lens of self-reflection.The author has treated the phenomenon of modern self-reflexivity as originally theological in nature in previous publications (notably Dante’s Paradiso and the Theological Origins of Modern Thought: Toward a Speculative Philosophy of Self-Reflection, Routledge, 2021).The present endeavor expands this overall intellectual project, extending it into detailed consideration of what is recognizably another nodal great work inaugurating unprecedented forms of self-reflection in the early modern period.Reading the founding texts of literary and cultural tradition in this negative-theological key proves crucial to allowing them to release the