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Reviewed by:
  • International Don Quixote
  • Bruce R. Burningham (bio)
International Don Quixote. Edited by Theo D’haen and Reindert Dhondt. Textext: Studies in Comparative Literature 57. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. 279 pp. Cloth $84.00.

The Modern Language Association was founded in 1883 to promote the study of vernacular (as opposed to classical) languages and literature. The success of the MLA’s initial project can be measured by the very existence of such departments as English, Spanish, French, Italian, and German (or variants and combinations thereof) at most institutions of higher education today. These programs of “national” languages and literatures were themselves established to promote what I have sometimes called the European “Great Powers” model of literary study. Writers like Shakespeare and Corneille were added to university curricula precisely because they were said to represent the epitome of the “Englishness” and the “Frenchness” of the respective nation-states from which they hailed. In the case of Spanish literature, such a nationalistic model was very well suited to the Generation of ‘98’s own project of converting a beleaguered Don Quixote into Spain’s existential patron saint following the Spanish-American War. Three decades later, in the wake of the Spanish Civil War, this nationalistic approach to Cervantes was further advanced by a generation of exiled Spanish intellectuals whose nostalgia for a “lost” homeland helped make Don Quixote’s exemplary “Spanishness” the predominate interpretive concern for much of the next fifty years.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, however, our literary landscape has changed substantially. The “Great Powers” model of literary categorization has given way (despite the continued existence of discrete academic departments like English and Spanish) to comparative literature, postcolonial theory, cultural studies, and other such approaches whose varying methodologies nonetheless share a common commitment to questioning [End Page 123] the hegemony of literary nationalism. And it is within this much more “global” literary geography that Theo D’haen and Reindert Dhondt offer readers their splendid collection of essays entitled International Don Quixote.

International Don Quixote has its origins in one of the numerous academic conferences organized worldwide in 2005 to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of part one of Don Quixote; in this case, a colloquium held at Leuven University in Belgium. D’haen and Dhondt’s collection includes fourteen essays. Many of these were originally written in Dutch or Spanish but all are published here in a very elegant and readable English. D’haen and Dhondt have done an excellent job of gathering a truly “international” set of essays and have grouped these essays into their own “international” categories (although, in truth, with the exception of María Stoopen, who teaches at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, all the contributors to this volume teach at universities in either Belgium or the Netherlands).

The first two essays in this collection, Dagmar Vandebosch’s “Quixotism as a Poetic and National Project in the Early Twentieth-Century Spanish Essay” and Patrick Collard’s “A Portrait of Cervantes as ‘A Learned Sancho Panza’: The Quixote in Ramón J. Sender’s Thought before the Civil War,” remind readers that the reputation of Cervantes’s novel during the early part of the twentieth century, before it became the international masterpiece examined by the book’s other scholars, largely rested on its intellectual centrality for Spain’s own sense of national identity. Vandebosch, for instance, discusses the Generation of ‘98’s solution to the “problem of Spain” by contrasting Miguel de Unamuno’s reading of the mad knight as a “tragic and idealistic hero” (21) with José Ortega y Gasset’s emphasis on the “quixotism of the book” (24). Collard, for his part, examines Sender’s intellectual engagement with Don Quixote when Sender was still a “young Marxist-oriented writer” during the time of the Second Republic (33).

The second group of essays in this volume exhibits a distinctly Latin American focus. Kristine Vanden Berghe’s “The Quixote in the Stories of Subcomandante Marcos” examines Marcos’s use of Cervantine themes—particularly in the figure of “Don Durito de la Lacandona”—as part of his larger engagement with the “mester de rebeldía” (60, 67). Reindert Dhondt...

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