“Blending in a baciyelmo: Don Quixote’s Genre Blending and the Invention of the Novel.”

An account of Cervantes’ "invention of the novel"--by mixing the genres of chivalric romance and picaresque tale--in terms of Blending Theory has several related aims, concerning issues in several related areas. First, regarding this text and its genre, I want to clarify Don Quixote’s structure, and its decisive impact on the novel genre. I will describe how Cervantes created a new genre template that later writers adopted by blending two known genres. Second, regarding literary genre theory, I want to clarify how genre blending shapes and refracts through various textual levels. I suggest that the narrative level of genre structure, the level of typical characters and actions, is the most fundamental one, as it has more influence on the structure of other levels than they have on it. This level is also fundamental in the unfolding of genre blends. Third, I hope this case study will also clarify the benefits and challenges of using Blending Theory to model cognitive structures and processes subtending discourse. Literary genre blending highlights the potential variability, complexity, and depth of ‘full meaning construction’ in discourse, and the case of Don Quixote suggests that it may be unrealistic to expect a simple answer to the question of exactly whose mental processes are being modeled in blending analyses. Finally, genre blending analyses offer a vantage on the cognitive study of culture, because they can clarify the structure and history of the worldviews that are combined and transformed in genre mixtures such as Cervantes’.