‘…The enemy is close and in this sad story, Ximena is the Cid’: Reading The Moor’s Last Sigh in light of Salman Rushdie’s sources

• Published in: Postmedieval a journal of medieval cultural studies 2022-12, Vol.13 (3-4), p.471-496
• Main Author: Pearce, S. J.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Armed forces; British & Irish literature; Cultural and Media Studies; Digital Humanities; English literature; History of Medieval Europe; Indian literature; Literary criticism; Literature; Medieval Literature; Novels; Original Article; Rushdie, Salman
• ISSN: 2040-5960; 2040-5979
• DOI: 10.1057/s41280-022-00257-9

‘Reading The Moor’s Last Sigh in light of Salman Rushdie’s sources’ seeks to shed light on the literary and historical sources that were used by Salman Rushdie in the course of writing about Islamic Spain, or al-Andalus, in his 1995 novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh , and to explore the ways in which those sources help to shape the narrative. In addition to transcribing and publishing the archival record of Rushdie’s personal bibliography of al-Andalus, the article particularly engages with his sources for the legends of the much-mythologised mercenary soldier Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, also known by the epithet el Cid . By doing so, the present study offers a more expansive, historically-contextualised reading of the titular ‘last sigh’ gesture that goes beyond its usual situation in the context of the surrender of Granada in 1492; and it also argues for the special centrality of women readers as figures within the novel, a contention that can be amplified through a source-critical reading of the novel and the scholarship and literature that form its textual substrata.