Monstruos que hablan

The monster is a key figure in Spanish early modern cultural production both literary and artistic. It embodies a revolutionary fictional discourse that reflects violence and ugliness but also freedom and spectacle. Beyond the perverse implications of the abject the monster has been linked to an excess of imagination and artificial creation from Aristotle to twenty-first-century cloning. Rogelio Miñana focuses on three of Miguel de Cervantes' most representative works: the short novel El coloquio de los perros the play <i>El rufián dichoso</i> and the novel <i>Don Quijote de la Mancha</i>.<br/><br/>Employing both close readings and monster theory Miñana argues that Cervantes' protagonists - as well as the very discourse that forges them - are monstrous: extreme beyond the norm threatening and threatened spectacular and fluid in identity form and behavior. Cervantes' pervasive discourse of monstrosity ultimately destabilizes fixed meanings and identities as it interrogates biological social legal religious and aesthetic orders. As extraordinary beings that test the limits of identity and narrative Miñana argues Cervantine talking monsters ultimately reveal the interpretive and discursive nature of the modern subject.