Answer:
It was realistic in contrast to fantastic and marvelous chivalric romances. The narrative romances before Don Quixote gave no importance to character's inner thoughts, while Don Quixote also presents insights into character's psychology.
Explanation:
The most significant element differentiating Don Quixote from literature before it is its form, content and treatment of subject. Literature before Don Quixote was mostly chivalric romance full of marvels and fantasies. Even if some of the literature before Don Quixote was realistic, it was in verse (Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales). In contrast Don Quixote was the first major realistic literature written in prose (later to be called novel).
The chivalric romance before Don Quixote featured disconnected stories of the same characters with little or no insight into character’s inner thoughts or psychology, while Don Quixote started the tradition of focusing more on character’s complex inner thoughts narrated in series on connected episodes.
Most of the literature before Don Quixote had main characters that were ideals without any flaws, but Don Quixote (as a protagonist) is a common man with many deficiencies.
So, Don Quixote laid a firm foundation on which future’s most important literary genre of novel was to be built.
