Poetic topics that lead to unhappiness: from La Galatea to the Persiles

Abstract

From La Galatea to the Persiles, Cervantes’s narrative is a rich metaliterary laboratory inhabited by different types of readers. The reader of poetry who expects his life to follow the rules of the poetic topics is one of them. It is a reader invariably doomed to failure due to the abyss that opens between his life and the poetic topics. The purpose of this article is to study this type of readers of poetry in the crossroads between the expectations of the literary genres that rule their stories and those of their poetic referents. The following characters will be analysed: Teolinda and Rosaura in La Galatea, Grisóstomo in Don Quixote, Ricardo in El amante liberal and the enamoured portuguese in the Persiles.