Where’s the Talking Dog in Don Quixote?

My research on the talking dogs in Cervantes was published in the special “Animal Narratology” edition of Humanities, a peer-reviewed academic journal. It expanded on my thesis for a Master of Liberal Arts (ALM) in literature from the Harvard Extension School.

The dogs

Spanish has a kennel’s worth of words for dog, and Don Quixote uses them with care: the alano (a mastiff), the galgo (a greyhound), the podenco (a hound), and the gozque (a small yapping cur). The very first sentence of the novel slips a galgo in among the hidalgo’s possessions — and then lets the dog disappear.

What happened to that galgo — and what does the dog have to say?

Publications

• The Search for Dog in Cervantes (2017) — Humanities
• La búsqueda del perro en Cervantes (2022) — translation by Rita Wirkala
• Narrative Complexity in the Talking-Dog Stories of Cervantes, Hoffmann, Gogol, Bulgakov, and Kafka (2012)