Amadis in English

This is a book about readers: readers reading and readers writing. They are readers of all ages and from all ages: young and old male and female from Europe and the Americas. The book they are reading is the Spanish chivalric romance <em>Amadís de Gaula</em> known in English as <em>Amadis de Gaule</em>.<br>Famous throughout the sixteenth century as the pinnacle of its fictional genre the cultural functions of <em>Amadis</em> were further elaborated by the publication of Cervantes's <em>Don Quixote</em> in 1605 in which <em>Amadis</em> features as Quixote's favourite book.<em> Amadis </em>thereby becomes as the philosopher Ortega y<br>Gasset terms it 'enclosed' within the modern novel and part of the imaginative landscape of British reader-authors such Mary Shelley Smollett Keats Southey Scott and Thackeray. <p/>Amadis <em>in English </em>ranges from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries demonstrating through this 'biography' of a book the deep cultural intellectual and political connections of English French and Spanish literature across five centuries. Simultaneously an ambitious work of transnational<br>literary history and a new intervention in the history of reading this study argues that romance is historically located culturally responsive and uniquely flexible in the re-creative possibilities it offers readers. By revealing this hitherto unexamined reading experience connecting readers of<br>all backgrounds <em> </em>Amadis <em>in English</em> also offers many new insights into the politicisation of literary history; the construction and misconstruction of literary relations between England France and Spain; the practice and pleasures of reading fiction; and the enduring power of imagination.<br>