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The Man Who Invented Fiction

How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World
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The Man Who Invented Fiction

By: William Egginton
Narrated by: Matt Fletcher-Macdonald
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‘In 1605 a crippled, greying, almost toothless veteran of Spain’s wars against the Ottoman Empire published a book. That book, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the most widely read author in human history. Cervantes did more than just publish a bestseller, though. He invented a way of writing.’

In Cervantes’ time, ‘fiction’ was synonymous with a lie. Books were either history, and true, or ‘poetry’ which might be invented, but had to conform to strict principles. Don Quixote tells the story of a poor nobleman, addled from reading too many books on chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off to put the world to rights. The book was hugely entertaining, broke the existing rules, devised a new set and, in the process, created a new, modern hybrid form we know today as the novel.

The Man Who Invented Fiction explores Cervantes’s life and the world he lived in, showing how his life and influences converged in his work, and how his work – especially Don Quixote – radically changed the nature of literature and created a new way of viewing the world. Finally, it explains how that worldview went on to infiltrate art, politics and science, and how the world today would be unthinkable without it.©2016 William Egginton (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC 17th Century Art & Literature Authors Civilization European Literary History & Criticism Modern World World Literature
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Critic reviews

Egginton's well-informed history of 16th-century Spanish life, politics, and culture makes for an engrossing read
Egginton shines in his literary analysis, teasing out Cervantes’s genius in accessible prose and showing how Don Quixote paved the way for modern fiction by exploring its characters’ inner lives…an entertaining and thought-provoking reading of Cervantes’s masterpiece
A revered classic here becomes strikingly new again. This belongs in public libraries where literary criticism and biography find eager readers
We need books like this: not-purely-academic studies that could reinvigorate contemporary fiction—the idea of what contemporary fiction is or could be—by intervening in the past
Insightful … Illuminating and engaging … Neatly poised between rigorous analysis and breezy accessibility
Here is a smart, thoughtful book that lucidly expounds a big idea (Sam Leith)
Exceptionally readable … much to whet the appetite
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