Alexander Samson, University College London

“Time Frames: Plotting Cervantes in Early Modern England”

The transgeneric adaptation of Cervantine plots in the plays of John Fletcher and others underlines the hold his prose fiction had on the late Jacobean literary imagination. So why was it that then that his novelistic experiments were not adopted until the 18th century when Cervantes was hailed as a forerunner of and adopted as a model for the English novel? In this paper, not only will I analyse the work that translation did in adapting and domesticating stories for different audiences and forms, but equally how the concerns of his prose fiction were replotted in relation to early modern English political and cultural concerns through this translatio, in particular in the wake of the Restoration. This is about time frames, whether the temporality of prose fiction itself or that of literary historiography. In the later 17th century, in addition to fresh translations, we see the beginning of a British Hispanism, literary criticism specifically aimed at disseminating knowledge and understanding of Spanish material. Perception of the times are at the heart of the novel and novelising. What happens to the historicity invoked by Cervantes as his prose fiction was appropriated and assimilated into the British novelistic tradition? Whether ahead of his time, foreshadowing the postmodern assimilation of fiction and history, or critiquing an obsolescent, anachronistic world, how we understand Cervantes and his place in the rise of the novel has everything to do with timeframes.

Alexander Samson is a Reader in Early Modern Studies at University College London. His research interests include the early colonial history of the Americas, Anglo-Spanish intercultural interactions and early modern English and Spanish drama. His book Mary and Philip: the Marriage of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain was published by Manchester University Press in 2020. He runs the Golden Age and Renaissance Research Seminar and is director of UCL’s Centre for Early Modern Exchanges and the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters.