The Generation of 1898 and Cervantes: The invention of Don Quixote as a national symbol

Abstract

Don Quixote became a Spanish national symbol thanks to the authors the Generation of 1898, such as Miguel de Unamuno, Azorín and Francisco Navarra Ledesma, who published their new interpretations during the 1905 commemoration of the publication of Cervantes', The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. Already a few months after suffering a humiliating defeat in the Spanish-American War of 1898, the famous novelist Benito Pérez Galdós argued that having lost the last vestiges of its once enormous colonial empire, Spain's greatest remaining source of pride was its magnificent cultural past, especially the great literary masterpiece of Miguel de Cervantes. Thus, in 1905 the publication of the novel was celebrated in a magnificent nation-wide commemoration, in which Don Quixote was praised as one of the highlights of Spain's literary heritage. However, it were the authors of the Generation of 1898 who converted the novel's hero into a national myth. In new masterpieces, such as Azorín's La ruta de Don Quijote and Unamuno's The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, they presented a new vitalist interpretation of Cervantes' novel, while making the fictional character of Don Quixote into a symbol of the entire nation. This way Don Quixote became larger than Cervantes himself, and this view was in a way immortalized in stone in the monument that was erected in the following decades at the Plaza de España of Madrid.