The Utopian Nexus in Don Quixote

Acknowledgments

   vii Acknowledgments In the course of the years that it has taken us to write this book, many friends and colleagues have asked us to explain what we were doing. As we strove to present our project in brief terms, they enabled us to clarify our ideas, to note lacunae, and to sharpen our arguments. We are grateful to them, though they may be unaware of how they helped and encouraged us. Various themes and sections of our project have been presented to academic audiences, including the Modern Language Association of America and Oxford, Hartford, and Vanderbilt universities , and we have benefited from the discussions that ensued on those occasions. We owe a deep debt of gratitude to Hertford College, Oxford, for a Visiting Fellowship; to the University of Hartford, Connecticut, for facilitating the fellowship and to the Rockefeller Foundation for a residency at the Villa Serbelloni Research Center in Bellagio, Italy, where we presented our preliminary draft. Our research has been greatly assisted by the eagerness and dedication of the staffs of the libraries where we have worked: the Bodleian and the Taylorian Libraries in Oxford; the Hispanic Society of America in New York; and the library of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, whose interlibrary loan staff came to our rescue more than once. Our thanks go to Anthony Close of Cambridge University for his detailed critical comments on an early draft. As a result, we present a more nuanced argument. In the same vein, we are particularly grateful to the two anonymous readers of Vanderbilt University Press for their extensive comments, one of whom raised important questions of viii   The Utopian Nexus in Don Quixote organization for our consideration. And we acknowledge the continued support and friendly encouragement of Edward Friedman, Donna Randall , and Marcia Welles. We have enjoyed an especially cooperative relationship with the Vanderbilt University Press, in particular with Betsy Phillips and Dariel Mayer. Special thanks go to the copyeditor David Ramsey for his meticulous combing of the text. Finally, we would be remiss if we failed to mention Kaitlin Walsh, a graduate student at the University of Hartford, who has cheerfully handled all of our technical difficulties in word processing on different machines with her usual intelligence, alacrity, and skill. Note on the Cited Texts All citations in Spanish from Cervantes’s Don Quixote, unless otherwise noted, are taken from Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, in the edition by Francisco Rico and Joaquín Foradellas, 2 vols. Barcelona: Crítica, 1998. The English translations , unless otherwise noted, are taken from Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote, translated by Edith Grossman, New York: Harper Collins, 2003. Citations from Don Quixote are noted by part, chapter, and page. For example, Part II, chapter 51, page 795 would be cited: II:51, 795. Page references are to the English version first, followed by the Spanish . In most cases, the quotation in Spanish, in brackets, follows the English. When only one page reference is given, we refer to the English translation. Translations from other works are our own unless stated otherwise. ...