Open Cultural Studies: Multicultural Cervantes

Last year’s commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Cervantes’s death (in April 1616) was, according to the BBC or The Guardian, overshadowed by the scope of the program marking Shakespeare’s death. Therefore, the aim of this special issue is to extend Cervantes quadricentennial festivities beyond the international congress “Cervantes from Andalusia, 1547 to 2016,” held in Castro del Río (Córdoba) from November 29 to December 2 last year.

This issue seeks to enhance Cervantes’s impact on other authors including many “fathers” of national literary traditions such as the English Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding; the Irish Laurence Sterne; the German Johann Wolfgang Goethe; the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges, or the Mexican Carlos Fuentes. Cervantes’s masterpiece Don Quixote inspired Byron (Don Juan), Dickens (The Pickwick Papers), Melville (Moby-Dick), Dostoevsky (The Idiot), or Twain (Huckleberry Finn), to mention just a few European and American canonical works. Don Quixote, like Shakespeare’s works, has been translated into more than 100 languages and been the source of more than 50 films. Cervantes is also credited with inventing the motif of the mismatched and bizarre duo, the delusional knight and Sancho Panza, which has been endlessly replicated in plays, films, stories or sitcoms.  Cervantes’s power to inspire has continued well into the 21st century – such literary giants as Salman Rushdie and Roberto Bolaño hailed Cervantes as a major influence.

This special issue makes appeal to researchers dealing with cross-pollination between the works of Cervantes and other cultural texts drawing on the legacy of the famous Spanish Golden Age writer. We particularly invite submissions on Cervantes’s impact on “quixotic” cultural expressions such as paintings, illustrations, music, opera, ballet or cartoons that have been little explored to date, or are worthy of being revisited through new research lenses.

The themes on which proposals may be submitted are:

• Cervantes, the Renaissance and Modern culture,
• Spanish cultural traits in the work of Cervantes,
• The depiction of foreign cultures in Cervantes’s work,
• Cervantes’s imprint on other literatures / the modern novel,
• The impact of Cervantes on other artistic media: painting, music, cinema, theatre, etc.,
• The response to Cervantes’s work in other cultures,
• Cervantes’s work and intertextuality,
• Don Quixote (and Sancho Panza) as a cultural/political symbol.

Manuscripts should be written in English (including quotes from Cervantes’ work, which must be translated into English). All submissions should follow the guidance at the below link: https://www.degruyter.com/view/supplement/s24513474_Instruction_for_Authors.pdf

The deadline for submission of final manuscripts is 30 July 2017. Please use the online submission system: http://www.editorialmanager.com/culture.

Contributors should note that, as this edited collection will be published online in the first instance, it will be possible to include colour images in submissions.