Editor’s Note

We begin this Spring 2018 issue of Cervantes with two essays that focus on works other than the often-commented Don Quixote. Ted Bergman’s “Olaus Magnus, Cervantes, and a World of Marvels” examines Olaus Magnus’s Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (A Description of the Northern Peoples) and argues that the work should be viewed not just as an informational source for Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, but also as a literary work in and of itself, one that often approaches the aesthetics of romance and the chivalric novel. Susan Byrne’s “Transcendence as Hyperbole in ‘La fuerza de la sangre’” examines Cervantes’s novela ejemplar through the lens of Neoplatonism and argues the work’s hyperbolic symbolism creates a crucial sense of irony in the novela.

Following these first two essays, we proceed to four articles that do focus on Don Quixote. Valeria Mora-Hernández’s essay, “‘Hasta que hubiese despejado todas aquellas sierras’: Peligro, soledad y penitencia en el espacio serrano de Don Quijote,” looks at the Sierra Morena episodes of part one, and argues that the “mountainous space” of these chapters needs to be re-examined in order to fully appreciate its transgressive ethos. Meanwhile, in her essay “Chivalry and the Female Reader in Part Two of Don Quijote,” Stacey Triplette takes a closer look at the construction of the “female reader” in the episodes that take place in the ducal palace, and argues that the Duchess’s literary influence on her female servants, particularly Altisidora, unexpectedly leads to a kind of rebellion in the household.

Turning to the novel’s famous front matter, Antonio Barbagallo’s “Consideraciones sobre el ‘Prólogo’ de Don Quijote de 1605” takes a fresh look at the interrelationship between the author, the reader, the “friend” who gives advice, and the book itself in order to unpack the various issues at play within the prologue to part one. Jorge Latorre and Oleksandr Pronkevich, for their part, in an essay titled “Don Quixote and the Cold War: Differences and Cultural Bridges,” examine several Cold War adaptations of Don Quixote (particularly by Grigori Kozintsev and Dale Wasserman) and argue that such texts, while clearly imbued with the socioeconomic values of the respective socialist and capitalist societies in which they were produced, represent nonetheless more than just pieces of propaganda. These media texts, Latorre and Pronkevich argue, also break through the limits of Cold War ideology.

Following these articles, the Spring 2018 issue includes a “debate” regarding the location of the famously enigmatic “lugar de la Mancha” of the opening line of Don Quixote in which we publish a formal response written by Francisco Parra Luna and Manuel Fernández Nieto to James Iffland’s 2009 review (republished here with his permission) of Parra Luna and Fernández Nieto’s interdisciplinary study El lugar de la Mancha es...El Quijote como un sistema de distancia/tiempos (Editorial Complutense, 2005).

The Spring 2018 issue concludes with four book reviews: Jesús Botello on Julia Farmer’s Imperial Tapestries: Narrative Form and the Question of Spanish Habsburg Power, 1530–1647; Clark Colahan on Guillermo Fernández Rodríguez-Escalona’s La concepción cervantina del hablar: Lenguaje y escala de valores en Don Quijote; Steven Wenz on Edith Grossman’s translation of the Novelas ejemplares; and Michael Behrens on Roberto González Echevarría’s Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

And finally, as always, I wish to express my thanks to our anonymous peer reviewers, to John Beusterien, and to our Associate Editors for their much-appreciated contributions to the production and publication of this journal.