This book relates Cervantes's poetics of comic fiction to the common framework of assumptions, values, and ideas held by Spaniards of the Golden Age about the comic and the kinds of writing which expressed it. This collective mentality underwent significant evolution in the period 1500 to 1630, and the factors which caused it are reflected in the ways in which the major comic genres--satire, the picaresque, the comedia, the novella--are re-launched, transformed, and theoretically rationalized around 1600, the moment when Don Quijote and Cervantes's most famous novelas were written. Though Cervantes is universally acknowledged to be a master of comic fiction, his poetics have never before been considered from that specific angle, nor in such ample scope. In particular, the book sets itself to identify the differences between that poetics and the conceptions of comic fiction of his contemporaries, including Mateo Alemán.