A groundbreaking cultural history of the most influential, most frequently translated, and most imitated novel in the world. The year 2015 marks the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the complete Don Quixote of La Mancha—an ageless masterpiece that has proven unusually fertile and endlessly adaptable. Flaubert was inspired to turn Emma Bovary into “a knight in skirts.” Freud studied Quixote’s psyche. Mark Twain was fascinated by it, as were Kafka, Picasso, Nabokov, Borges, and Orson Welles. The novel has spawned ballets and operas, poems and plays, movies and video games, and even shapes the identities of entire nations. Spain uses it as a sort of constitution and travel guide; and the Americas were conquered, then sought their independence, with the knight as a role model. In Quixote, Ilan Stavans, one of today’s preeminent cultural commentators, explores these many manifestations. Training his eye on the tumultuous struggle between logic and dreams, he reveals the ways in which a work of literature is a living thing that influences and is influenced by the world around it.

Millennial Cervantes explores some of the most important recent trends in Cervantes scholarship in the twenty-first century. It brings together leading Cervantes scholars of the United States in order to showcase their cutting-edge work within a cultural studies frame that encompasses everything from ekphrasis to philosophy, from sexuality to Cold War political satire, and from the culinary arts to the digital humanities. Millennial Cervantes is divided into three sets of essays—conceptually organized around thematic and methodological lines that move outward in a series of concentric circles. The first group, focused on the concept of “Cervantes in his original contexts,” features essays that bring new insights to these texts within the primary context of early modern Iberian culture. The second group, focused on the concept of “Cervantes in comparative contexts,” features essays that examine Cervantes’s works in conjunction with those of the English-speaking world, both seventeenth- and twentieth-century. The third group, focused on the concept of “Cervantes in wider cultural contexts,” examines Cervantes’s works—principally Don Quixote—as points of departure for other cultural products and wider intellectual debates. This collection articulates the state of Cervantes studies in the first two decades of the new millennium as we move further into a century that promises both unimagined technological advances and the concomitant cultural changes that will naturally adhere to this new technology, whatever it may be.

Don Juan Manuel, nephew of King Alfonso X, The Wise, knew well the appeal of exempla (moralized tales), which he believed should entertain if they were to provide ways and means for solving life's problems. His fourteenth-century book, known as El Conde lucanor, is considered by many to be the purest Spanish prose before the immortal Don Quixote of Cervantes written two centuries later. He found inspiration for his tales in classical and eastern literatures, Spanish history, and folklore. His stories are not translations, but are his retelling of some of the best stories in existence. The translation succeeds in making the author speak as clearly to the modern reader as to readers of his own time.

Ever since its appearance, Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote has exerted a powerful influence on the artistic imagination all around the world. This cross-cultural volume offers important new readings of canonical reinterpretations of the Quixote: from Unamuno to Borges, from Ortega y Gasset to Calvino, from Mark Twain to Carlos Fuentes. But to the prestigious list of well-known authors who acknowledged Cervantes' influence, it also adds new and surprising names, such as that of Subcomandante Marcos, who gives a Cervantine twist to his Mexican Zapatista revolution. Attention is paid to successful contemporary authors such as Paul Auster and Ricardo Piglia, as well as to the forgotten voice of the Belgian writer Joseph Grandgagnage. The volume breaks new ground by taking into consideration Belgian music and Dutch translations, as well as Cervantine procedures in Terry Gilliam's Lost in La Mancha. In all, this book constitutes an indispensable guide for the further study of the Quixote's Nachleben and offers exciting proposals for rereading Cervantes.

"This book presents a composite picture of the richness of proverbs as significant expressions of folk wisdom as is manifest from their appearance in art, culture, folklore, history, literature, and the mass media. The book draws attention to the fact that proverbs as metaphorical signs continue to play an important role in oral and written communication. Proverbs as so-called monumenta humana are omnipresent in all facets of life, and while they are neither sacrosanct nor saccharine, they usually offer much common sense or wisdom based on recurrent experiences and observations."--BOOK JACKET.

By combining Daumier's drawings with selected examples of his paintings, prints, and bronzes, this book traces the evolution of the artist's succinct and emphatically expressive style from its roots in the European tradition exemplified by Rembrandt, Rubens, and Fragonard to its modern manifestations in the works of Degas, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Beckmann. In the course of his long and productive career Daumier returned again and again to favorite themes, often after considerable lapses of time. Thus the works here are grouped by their subject matter into six sections: studies of individual figures and faces; narrative scenes inspired by history or literature; views of contemporary urban and domestic life; dramatic portrayals of lawyers in court; depictions of street performers; and episodes in the wanderings of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

Franz Kafka, the author has very nicely narrated the story of Gregou Samsa who wakes up one day to discover that he has metamorphosed into a bug. The book concerns itself with the themes of alienation and existentialism. The author has written many important stories, including ‘The Judgement’, and much of his novels ‘Amerika’, ‘The Castle’, ‘The Hunger Artist’. Many of his stories were published during his lifetime but many were not. Over the course of the 1920s and 30s Kafka’s works were published and translated instantly becoming landmarks of twentieth-century literature. Ironically, the story ends on an optimistic note, as the family puts itself back together. The style of the book epitomizes Kafka’s writing. Kafka very interestingly, used to present an impossible situation, such as a man’s transformation into an insect, and develop the story from there with perfect realism and intense attention to detail. The Metamorphosis is an autobiographical piece of writing, and we find that parts of the story reflect Kafka’s own life.