ABSTRACT
The relationship between the ‘idealistic’ and ‘realistic’ aspects of Cervantes’ work has always presented problems for critics, but in a landmark essay, E. C. Riley made a notable advance in clarifying this vexed issue by advocating the use of the term ‘romance’ to describe the idealistic aspects of Cervantes’ prose fiction. 1 The advantage of the term ‘romance’ was that, unlike the vague term ‘idealist’, it helped to identify a recurrent pattern of themes and conventions which characterized a certain traditional mode of story-telling, and this more clearly delineated the boundaries between the two modes of writing which are so evident in Cervantes’ work as a whole.
