Julio Baena offers a new analysis of Cervantes's last and most controversial novel, Los trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda. He focuses special attention on the first chapter, which he sees as a microcosm of the entire novel, and he identifies an important correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm in Cervantes's allegorical text. Placing the novel within the intellectual context of its era, Baena uses poststructuralist methodologies to develop the existential implications of Persiles's central cosmological metaphor.
