Editor’s Note
- Editor’s Note
In the wake of last Fall’s guest-edited “número monográfico,” the Spring 2015 issue of Cervantes returns us to what Robert’s Rules of Order might call our “usual order” of publication; which is to say, nearly all of the articles that appear in the following pages were submitted, peer-reviewed, and accepted for publication through our usual double-blind submissions process. Nevertheless, this current issue, in partial commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the publication of part two of Don Quixote, is not without a special topic of its own.
Before getting to this special topic, however, the Spring 2015 issue begins with a much-deserved tribute to our dear friend and colleague, and my immediate predecessor, Tom Lathrop, written by Michael McGrath. As most readers already know, Tom passed away unexpectedly in February 2014 while spending time with his family in California. McGrath’s tribute essay certainly speaks for itself. But I would be re-miss if I did not take this opportunity to express our collective debt of gratitude to Tom for all that he did for Hispanism and, particularly, for the world of Cervantes scholarship. His passing has left a large hole in our field and he will be sorely missed. On a personal note, I was deeply honored to follow in Tom’s footsteps as Editor of this journal, and I am acutely aware—even as I write these words into a template that he designed for the typesetting software we still use—of his tangible impact on this endeavor. He was truly a gentleman and a scholar.
Returning to the special topic mentioned above, during the past few months, several essays emerged—either through our usual submissions process or as papers delivered at one or another recent Cervantes symposium—that seemed tailor-made for a special cluster on the influence of Don Quixote on twentieth-century US culture. The first of these articles, written by William Childers, examines the role of Cervantes’s [End Page 7] novel in “mediating” between European and US societies. The second article of the cluster, written by Massimiliano Giorgini, traces the evocation and representation of Don Quixote in American folk music and punk rock. Cory Duclos, for his part, explores the representation of Don Quixote (in comic book or graphic novel form) in the pages of Boy’s Life, the official magazine of the Boy Scouts of America, during much of the twentieth-century. Wrapping up this cluster is an article by Roy Williams on John Steinbeck’s unfinished Quixote novel, “Don Keehan, The Marshal of Manchon.” Having recently acquired Steinbeck’s mansucript, Williams not only gives us a glimps into the pages of Steinbeck’s abandoned novel, but also argues that key aspects of Dale Wasserman’s Man of La Mancha can be traced directly back to this little-known text.
Immediately following this cluster, and as a nice segue out of it, we offer an essay by Slav Gratchev on the relationship between Don Quixote and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Following Gratchev’s piece, we offer three essays on aspects of Cervantes’s other works: Wendell Smith on “La gitanilla,” Tania de Miguel Magros on El trato de Argel, and Francesca De Santis on the sonnet “Vimos en julio otra Semana Santa.”
This Spring 2015 issue of Cervantes concludes with three book re-views: Enrique García Santo-Tomás on Roland Greene’s Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes, Luis Gómez Canseco on Ana María Rodríguez-Rodríguez’s Letras liberadas: Cautivero, escritura y subjetividad en el Mediterráneo de la época imperial española, and Matthew A. Wyszynski on Juan Pablo Gil-Oslé’s Amistades imperfectas: Del Humanismo a la Ilustración con Cervantes.
By way of conclusion, I would like to thank my new editorial assistant John Beusterien for helping me stay on top of the submissions process. And, as always, I thank our many peer reviewers and Associate Editors for all their hard work. [End Page 8]
