Maria Zambrano and the Chimera

During her career as a philosopher, writer and thinker, Maria Zambrano once and again portrayed literature as a special space for her research. In that sense, she investigated the principal traits belonging to the poetic reason in several genres such as poetry and fiction. The purpose of the following pages is to investigate the way in which she read and recreated literary works chiefly by Miguel de Cervantes and Benito Perez Galdos. Her literary criticism is anchored to metaphoric symbolism. One of her most recurrent symbols is the chimera. The chimera becomes an indispensable and ambiguous image in her analysis of Don Quixote and Misericordia.