American literary critic and scholar Harry Levin writes in “The Example of Cervantes” in Contexts of Criticism, his introduction to literary criticism,

To crown him with an adjective of his own choosing, Cervantes continues to be the exemplary novelist. It is a truism, of course, that he set the example for all other novelists to follow. The paradox is that, by exemplifjing the effects of fantasy on the mind, he pointed the one way for fiction to attain the effect of truth.