International Don Quixote (review)

2005 marked the four-hundredth anniversary of the original publication of the first installment of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote. This collection of fourteen essays, made up primarily of papers delivered that year at a commemorative conference held at Leuven University in Belgium, attempts to contribute to the tidal wave of special journal issues and other celebratory volumes published around this anniversary, both within the field of early modern Spanish studies and in the broader field of Comparative Literature. The goals of the volume are summarized by the editors as "to demythologize the ingenious gentleman as a national redeemer and to do justice to the novel's complexity and international reception and success" (8). This broad mission statement reflects three areas of interest: historical analysis of the critical reception of the Quixote in Spain, textual analysis of the novel (in the mode of comparative analysis involving texts from around the globe), and a cultural analysis of the novel's importance in World literatures and cultures. These interests constitute a comprehensive superstructure for an academic conference of this nature. While the published essays do not consistently deliver noteworthy contributions in all of these areas of interest, they do as a whole offer added insight to the ongoing conversations regarding Don Quixote among both Hispanists and comparatists.

Given the authorship and editorship of the collection—ten of fourteen essay authors and both editors are affiliated with K.U. Leuven/Leuven University—as well as its publication within the series Studies in Comparative Literature, the presumed readership of the volume is comparatists whose own knowledge of the Quixote generally stems from its inclusion among the "Great Books" of Western literature. The implication of this readership is that the volume's interest in "demythologizing the ingenious gentleman as a national redeemer," or offering a critical reading of the process through which the Quixote was canonized and nationalized in Spain, reads more as a primer for the non-Hispanist unfamiliar with the novel's nationalist context. This context is crucial for Quixote studies, as the field's early twentieth-century foundational texts would prove decisively influential for the better known (among comparatists) work of Américo Castro in Spain and the more famous mid-century European scholarship of writers like Mikhail Bakhtin and Michel Foucault. Thus the volume's first two essays, while presenting nothing especially new for scholars well versed in the national Spanish tradition, take care to explain the significance of Cervantes for these Spaniards while noting their implications for the better known work of Bakhtin and Foucault. In this spirit Dagmar Vandebosch's "Quixotism as a Poetic and National Project in the Early Twentieth-Century Spanish Essay" contrasts Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset in a way that does not require extensive previous exposure to them, but that does succinctly read their respective discursive appropriations of Cervantes as indicative of a broader Spanish intellectual obsession. Patrick Collard's "A Portrait of Cervantes as 'A Learned Sancho Panza': The Quixote in Ramón J. Sender's Thought before the Civil War" carries Vandebosch's analysis into the context of the Spanish Civil War and beyond, thus allowing the non-Hispanist reader to better grasp the extent to which a reading of the Quixote's reception history in Spain is inextricably linked to Spanish history itself.

The next block of essays engages the more complicated cultural negotiations at play in the novel's reception in Latin America. The extent to which Latin American identities are simultaneously defined against Spain and through Spanish cultural patrimony is a fascinating topic deserving of much more attention by comparatists than it has yet received. Kristine Vanden Berghe exemplifies the ubiquity of the Quixote in a myriad of discursive performances in Latin America in her study of the communiqués of the Mexican Zapatista revolutionary Subcomandante Marcos, while Reindert Dhondt offers a more traditional (but very effective) analysis of the novel's importance for the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes and his influential vision of world literature. Nadia Lie revisits the well-known intertextual relationship...