Novelas ejemplares Reading Order

Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Novels, 1613) by Miguel de Cervantes are the twelve short novels Cervantes published in the decade between the two parts of Don Quixote — the first original prose fiction collection in Spanish, and a work that ranges astonishingly across registers: from the picaresque comedy of Rinconete y Cortadillo (two young thieves in the criminal underworld of Seville) to the idealized pastoral of La Galatea, from the bitter satirical allegory of El coloquio de los perros (two dogs philosophizing about society through the night) to the romantic adventure of La española inglesa. Cervantes called them 'exemplary' with deliberate irony — they are exemplary in the sense that they model human types and situations, but rarely in the moral sense. The collection is a crucial part of understanding Cervantes as a writer: the experiments in form, voice, and genre that would be synthesized in Don Quixote are visible here in their more discrete forms. El licenciado Vidriera (the man who believes he is made of glass) anticipates the novel's interest in madness and literature; El casamiento engañoso y el coloquio de los perros is a double novella in which a frame story opens onto a dog's-eye view of all Spanish society. Read as a collection, the Novelas ejemplares reveal Cervantes as the inventor not just of the modern novel but of the short story as a literary form.