Lecturas ELI Adolescentes 1/A1: Rinconete y Cortadillo + Downloadable Multimedia – de Cervantes Miguel (2014)

This Spanish-language graded reader for secondary-school students presents Miguel de Cervantes’s Rinconete y Cortadillo at level A1. The ELI Adolescentes series offers high-quality literary narratives, including classics in full or adapted to different learning levels, accompanied by sections on the author and their work, further exploration and activities that support reading comprehension and language learning. The series follows school curricula and develops linguistic structures and vocabulary in a coherent progression through three levels from A1 to A2/B1, with exercises linked to language certification. Rinconete y Cortadillo, one of the twelve short narratives in Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares, is a picaresque portrait of criminal activity in Cervantes’s time. As Carlos Blanco Aguinaga argues in one of his critical essays, however, it is not simply a picaresque novel, but gives its characters a distinctive depth that sets them apart from similar works such as La vida del Buscón and Guzmán de Alfarache. Cervantes refers to the story in Chapter 47 of the first part of Don Quixote, indicating that it predates that part of the novel.