El «donoso y grande escrutinio» o las caras de la censura

Abstract

The confusion that derives from certain Cervantine commentaries on censorship has inconvenienced certain historians describing his attitude towards freedom or repression. In this work different passages from Don Quijote are analyzed, in which one observes the perplexity of an author obliged to decide between transgression of the limits or the necessity of the norms. The scrutiny of the Don Quixote's library was not merely a critique of a certain kind of Spanish literature and an evaluation of prose fiction. In this chapter and other passages of the novel, Cervantes echoes the diverse practices of censorship that were applied -with singular criteria- to the universe of the written culture.