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Cervantes’ Don Quixote is the most widely read masterpiece in world literature, as appealing to readers today as four hundred years ago. In Fighting Windmills Manuel Durán and Fay R. Rogg offer a beautifully written excursion into Cervantes’ great novel and trace its impact on writers and thinkers across centuries and continents. How did Cervantes write such a rich tale? Durán and Rogg explore the details of Cervantes’ life, the techniques with which he constructed the novel, and the central themes of the adventures of Don Quixote and his earthy squire Sancho Panza. The authors then provide an insightful, panoramic view of Cervantes’ powerful influence on generations of writers as diverse as Descartes, Voltaire, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Twain, and Borges.
Arguably the most influential work to emerge from Spain's Golden Age, Don Quixote laid the groundwork for the Western literary canon and remains one of its major achievements.
This study shows that Cervantes’s works actively influenced the literature of a number of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century writers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. This time period was marked by numerous significant events, including World War I, the first attempts at democracy, the rise of the Nazis, World War II, the division of Germany, and the eventual reunification of Germany. Representations of characters created by Cervantes reflect the shifting viewpoints of monarchism, imperialism, communism, fascism, socialism, and capitalism. A number of German-speaking authors of this time creatively modify Don Quixote, vacillating between regarding Don Quixote as a fool or a hero. The emphasis here is on the question of how an author uses Cervantes’s Don Quixote and The Conversation of the Dogs to come to terms with his or her own preoccupations in a given socio-political context. This book explores literary works by German-speaking authors that engage in an intertextual play with a text written by Cervantes.
The Afterlife of Texts in Translation: Understanding the Messianic in Literature reads Walter Benjamin’s and Jacques Derrida’s writings on translation as suggesting that texts exist within a process of continual translation. Understanding Benjamin’s and Derrida’s concept of ‘afterlife’ as ‘overliving’, this book proposes that reading Benjamin’s and Derrida’s writings on translation in terms of their wider thought on language and history suggests that textuality itself possesses a ‘messianic’ quality. Developing this idea in relation to the many rewritings and translations of Don Quijote, particularly the multiple rewritings by Jorge Luis Borges, Edmund Chapman asserts that texts consist of a structure of potential for endless translation that continually promises the overcoming of language, history and textuality itself.
Ever since its appearance, Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote has exerted a powerful influence on the artistic imagination all around the world. This cross-cultural volume offers important new readings of canonical reinterpretations of the Quixote: from Unamuno to Borges, from Ortega y Gasset to Calvino, from Mark Twain to Carlos Fuentes. But to the prestigious list of well-known authors who acknowledged Cervantes’ influence, it also adds new and surprising names, such as that of Subcomandante Marcos, who gives a Cervantine twist to his Mexican Zapatista revolution. Attention is paid to successful contemporary authors such as Paul Auster and Ricardo Piglia, as well as to the forgotten voice of the Belgian writer Joseph Grandgagnage. The volume breaks new ground by taking into consideration Belgian music and Dutch translations, as well as Cervantine procedures in Terry Gilliam’s Lost in La Mancha. In all, this book constitutes an indispensable guide for the further study of the Quixote’s Nachleben and offers exciting proposals for rereading Cervantes.
This book explores, through a multidisciplinary approach, the immense influence exerted by Bernard Shaw on the Spanish-speaking world on both sides of the Atlantic. This collection of essays encompasses the reception and dissemination of his ideas; the translation of his works into Spanish; the performance history of his plays in Spain and Latin America; and Shaw’s influence on many key figures of literature in Spanish. It begins by delving into Shaw’s knowledge of Spanish literature and gauging his acquaintance with the Spanish cultural milieu throughout his tenure as an art, music, and theatre critic. His early exposure to Spanish-speaking culture later made the return trip in the form of profuse critical reception and theatrical success in countries like Spain, Argentina, Mexico, and Uruguay. This allows for a more detailed investigation into the unmistakable mark that Bernard Shaw left in the oeuvre of leading Spanish-speaking authors like Ramiro de Maeztu, Jorge Luis Borges or Nemesio Canales. This volume also assesses the translations of Shaw’s works into Spanish—while also providing a detailed publication history of these translations.
Cervantes is regarded as the author of the first novel and the inventor of fiction. From its publication in 1605, Don Quixote--recently named the world's best book by authors from 54 countries--has been widely translated and imitated. Among its less acknowledged imitations are stories in children's literature. In context of English adaptation and critical response this book explores the noble and "mad" adventures retold for children by distinguished writers and artists in Edwardian books, collections, home libraries, schoolbooks and picture books. More recent adaptations including comics and graphic novels deviate from traditional retellings. All speak to the knight-errant's lasting influence and appeal to children.
Don Quixote Explained focuses on seven topics: how Sancho Panza refines into a good governor through a series of jokes that turn earnest; how Cervantes satirizes religious extremism in Don Quixote by taking aim at the Holy Roman Catholic Church; how Don Quixote and Sancho Panza check-and-balance one anothers excesses by having opposite identities; how Cervantes refines Spanish farm girls by transforming Aldonza Lorenzo into Dulcinea; how outlaws like Roque Guinart and Gines Pasamonte can avoid criminality and why; how Cervantes establishes inter-religional harmony by having a Christian translator, on the one hand, and a Muslim narrator, on the other; and lastly, how Cervantes replaces a medieval view of love and marriage?where a woman is a housekeeper, lust-satisfier, and child begetter?with a modern view of equalitarian marriage typified by a joining of desires and a merger of personalities. "AN ERUDITE EXAMINATION OF THE THEMES AND IDEAS IN DON QUIXOTE. I THOROUGHLY ENJOYED THE WRITING AND EXPOSITION OF THIS WELL-REASONED CRITIQUE. BUY IT AND STUDY IT. GERALD J. DAVIS, AUTHOR OF DON QUIXOTE, THE NEW TRANSLATION BY GERALD J. DAVIS" WWW.DON-QUIXOTE-EXPLAINED.COM
The development of basic textual strategies in Spanish fiction from 1902 to 1926 is the focus of this study. Challenging traditional views of the relationships between the literature produced by the Generation of 1898 and the Spanish vanguard movement, Spires traces through analyses of select works a process of evolution beginning at the turn of the century and continuing into the 1920s. Spires demonstrates how the somewhat tentative strategies of the first decade became more daring in the second. As opposed to the extant historical, autobiographical, and thematic surveys of this period, Transparent Simulacra features structuralist and post-structuralist readings of fiction by Baroja, Azorín, Unamuno, Pérez de Ayala, Gómez de Serna, Jarnés, and Salinas. These approaches offer not only revisionist views of a literary period but also revisionist readings of some of Spain's best-known fiction.