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An essay in The Walrus reviews Don Quixote's place in literary history.

Is there anything the novel form designed by Cervantes can't do? The diligent reader of Don Quixote may end up answering with a flat no. And yet the author is determined to emphasize one restriction, although he probably thinks of it more as an ironic truth. The novel can't do reality. It can't ever not be a book. Whether we choose to admit it or not, the moment we open a work of fiction we have exited life and entered art. We're down a road and off on a quest, and neither the destination, nor necessarily the purposes, are at first obvious.

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The Czech novelist Milan Kundera believes the legacy of Don Quixote has been denigrated by an adherence to the "imperative of verisimilitude" in the novel. He lays partial blame on our fixation with realistic settings and chronological order. Glover qualifies Kundera by suggesting that literary realism is a technique that becomes problematic only "when someone tries to turn it into a definition." Glover admits, however, that this is precisely what "unthinking writers and journalist-critics" have done. Psychological realism, with its emphasis on credible plots and believable characters, is a major tradition in western literature. But it isn't the only one.