El retablo de la libertad: La actualidad del Quijote ed. by Mianda Cioba et al. (review)

Occasioned by the celebration of the 400th anniversary of the publication of the second volume of Don Quixote, the volume El retablo de la libertad: La actualidad del Quijote is the outcome of a colloquium organized by the Spanish Department of the University of Bucharest in November of 2015. As the volume's subtitle suggests, the heterogeneous collection of essays zeroes in on the topical interest in the prodigious legacy left by Cervantes's masterpiece. Master Peter's retablo sets the tone for a body of research that enables scholars of Cervantes, Spanish studies, and comparative literature from Spain and Eastern Europe to make compelling contributions to the multifaceted question of freedom. Thus, the wide array of issues addressed ranges from the impact of previous writers and literary genres on the theme and structural design of the first modern novel to semiotic interpretations, narratological insights, philosophical investigations, and the reception of Cervantes in other cultures.

The volume comprises five sections and is preceded by an introduction in which Francisco Javier Díez de Revenga highlights the major analytical foci and textual richness of Don Quixote, which is also indicative of its inexhaustible potential to open up new vistas. In the second part of the introduction Díez de Revenga avers that the goal of the colloquium was to interpret Don Quixote as a "retablo de la libertad" and, consequently, he expounds on the love for freedom epitomized by Don Quixote and upheld by Cervantes's humanism "en una escritura que alcanzó a la excelsitud" (11-12).

The first section, titled "El universo novelesco: Ante rem et in re," considers the "excelsitud" of Don Quixote built on previous generic categories cannibalized by the novel in order to create a modern narrative discourse. Cristina Castillo Martínez analyses the insertion of pastoral literature in Don Quixote and shows how the genre cast in a new mould in the first modern novel resembles the picaresque "en la medida en que Cervantes descompone el género en sus características más representativas para darle la vuelta y mostrarnos las costuras" (35). Ángel García Galiano provides a convincing account of Master Peter's puppet show, an episode intertwined with the events that occurred in the cave of Montesinos where Don Quixote saw Dulcinea transformed into a peasant girl. The captivity of Melisendra and Don Quixote's own identification with Don Gaiferos revive Don Quixote's feeling of anguish at what happened in the cave and is conducive to the destruction of the puppets perceived as an ultimate form of catharsis able to disenchant "los fantasmas más oscuros de su alma" (49). Silvia-Alexandra Ştefan proposes an exciting and most welcome reading of the prologues to both volumes of Don Quixote, which are examined in liaison with Fernando de Herrera's Anotaciones a la poesia de Garcilaso. Supported by judicious literary facts and comparative quotations from primary texts, Ştefan offers a new insight into the well-known mid-sixteenth-century Herrerian and Góngorian polemics poetically represented in the two madmen's accounts in the second prologue. The presence of Tirant lo Blanc in Don Quixote urges Jiři Pešek to explore the former as a serious literary model reflected in Cervantes's novel structurally and ideologically, unlike Amadís and other chivalry romances, which only serve as a Cervantine satirical butt. However, the question in the title, "¿Dónde comienza el canon de la novela europea?," remains to be answered more convincingly from the point of view of genre theory. Much in the vein of Castillo Martínez's article, Pavlína Juračková's intervention focuses on Cervantes's appropriation and revision of the bucolic tradition and demonstrates that the pastoral genre was a relevant literary medium to the emergence of the first modern novel.

The second section...