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The Novel and the World
W.W. Norton
September 2015
On Sale: September 8, 2015
212 pages ISBN: 0393083020 EAN: 9780393083026 Kindle: B00TG24BF8 Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction History
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.
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