Cervantes in Algiers
Cervantes in Algiers is a book written by María Antonia Garcés. The book was published in 2005 and is listed under the Health & Fitness category. For readers who want to quickly understand what this title offers, this page gives a clear overview of the book, including its description, author information, page count, ratings, and ISBN details.
The full title of the book is Cervantes in Algiers. When available, the subtitle is A Captive’s Tale, which gives extra context about the theme, focus, or main idea behind the book. According to the available description, Returning to Spain after fighting in the Battle of Lepanto and other Mediterranean campaigns against the Turks, the soldier Miguel de Cervantes was captured by Barbary pirates and taken captive to Algiers. The five years he spent in the Algerian bagnios or prison-houses (1575-1580) made an indelible impression on his works. From the first plays and narratives written after his release to his posthumous novel, the story of Cervantes’s traumatic experience continuously speaks through his writings. Cervantes in Algiers offers a comprehensive view of his life as a slave and, particularly, of the lingering effects this traumatic experience had on his literary production. No work has documented in such vivid and illuminating detail the socio-political world of sixteenth-century Algiers, Cervantes’s life in the prison-house, his four escape attempts, and the conditions of his final ransom. Garces’s portrait of a sophisticated multi-ethnic culture in Algiers, moreover, is likely to open up new discussions about early modern encounters between Christians and Muslims. By bringing together evidence from many different sources, historical and literary, Garces reconstructs the relations between Christians, Muslims, and renegades in a number of Cervantes’s writings. The idea that survivors of captivity need to repeat their story in order to survive (an insight invoked from Coleridge to Primo Levi to Dori Laub) explains not only Cervantes’s storytelling but also the book that theorizes it so compellingly. As a former captive herself (a hostage of Colombian guerrillas), the author reads and listens to Cervantes with another ear.
This book has 368 pages, making it useful for readers who want to know the approximate length before starting. It has an average rating of 3.14, based on 7 ratings, which can help readers understand how other people have responded to it.
For cataloging and reference purposes, the ISBN-13 is 9780826514707, while the ISBN-10 is 0826514707. These numbers are helpful when searching for the exact edition of the book online, in libraries, or in bookstores.
The book cover image can be viewed here: http://books.google.com/books/content?id=h97ivaPeOx8C&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&source=gbs_api.
Overall, Cervantes in Algiers by María Antonia Garcés is a title that may interest readers looking for books in Health & Fitness. Whether you are researching new books, comparing editions, or building a reading list, this page gives you the most important details in one place.
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