Research Paper on:
A Reading of Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
chivalry. During this time, in life and in art, a man was judged not by his physical appearance, economic or social status, but by the true content of his  character. However, by the time novelist Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra rode onto the European literary scene in the seventeenth century with his imaginative adventure, Don Quixote de la Mancha,  the adventurous tales of courageous knights were beginning to lose their popular appeal. He created a protagonist that seemed woefully out of place in the increasingly sophisticated landscape of  Western Europe. This was exactly the point. The middle-aged bachelor Alonso Quixano filled his lonely days with books describing in vivid detail the exploits of knight-errantry. Instead  of interpreting these fanciful tales as works of fiction, Alonso believed them to be truth, and he decided to attach some meaning to his life by becoming Don Quixote de  la Mancha, a knight who would gallop through the countryside with his horse, Rosinante, dedicated to protecting the world from corruption and injustice. Of course a man who would  do such a thing would have to be insane, which was how Alonso is initially portrayed in the text. One can imagine the author mocking him in the following  description, "Having quite lost his wits, he fell into one of the strangest conceits that ever entered the head of any madman; which was, that he thought it expedient  and necessary, as well for the advancement of his own reputation, as for the public good, that he should commence knight-errant, and wander through the world, with his horse and  arms, in quest of adventures, and to put in practice whatever he had read to have been practiced by knights-errant; redressing all kind of grievances, and exposing himself to danger