The attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 was a tragic illustration of the existential threat that the viral spread of disinformation poses in the age of social media and twenty-four-hour news. From climate change denialism to the frenzied conspiracy theories and racist mythologies that fuel antidemocratic white nationalist movements in the United States and abroad, What Would Cervantes Do? is a lucid meditation on the key role the humanities must play in dissecting and combatting all forms of disinformation. David Castillo and William Egginton travel back to the early modern period, the first age of inflationary media, in search of historically tested strategies to overcome disinformation and shed light on our post-truth market. Through a series of critical conversations between cultural icons of the twenty-first century and those of the Spanish Golden Age, What Would Cervantes Do? provides a tour-de-force commentary on current politics and popular culture. Offering a diverse range of Cervantist comparative readings of contemporary cultural texts – movies, television shows, and infotainment – alongside ideas and issues from literary and cultural texts of early modern Spain, Castillo and Egginton present a new way of unpacking the logic of contemporary media. What Would Cervantes Do? is an urgent and timely self-help manual for literary scholars and humanists of all stripes, and a powerful toolkit for reality literacy.

Eisner continues his series of adaptations of classic tales with this charming and delightfully humourous rendition of Cervantes Don Quixote. The famous knight was quite a gentleman, man of honour and idealist, his selflessness and gallantry made him a legend. A touching story given a new edge by the beautiful full colour illustration and unique interpretation by the master story teller Will Eisner.

In the early seventeenth century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a book. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from reading too many books of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. That book, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in human history. Cervantes did more than just publish a bestseller, though. He invented a way of writing. This book is about how Cervantes came to create what we now call fiction, and how fiction changed the world. The Man Who Invented Fiction explores Cervantes's life and the world he lived in, showing how his influences converged in his work, and how his work--especially Don Quixote--radically changed the nature of literature and created a new way of viewing the world. Finally, it explains how that worldview went on to infiltrate art, politics, and science, and how the world today would be unimaginable without it. William Egginton has brought thrilling new meaning to an immortal novel.

Anthony Close's study places Don Quixote in the context of Cervantes' life and literary career, and in the book's cultural and social background. It focuses primarily on the central problems of Cervantine comedy, the use of burlesque, the presentation of characters through dialogue, the narrator's viewpoint, the virtuoso play with registers, and the complex and elusive irony. Using detailed analysis of individual passages, Dr Close shows how the moral themes of the novel are distilled in its humour, and in the characters of Don Quixote and Sancho. He also gives particular attention to the impact of this landmark text on the development of the European novel.

CERVANTES'S EIGHT INTERLUDES

ABOUT THE BOOK When I first read Don Quixote, I was fascinated by the protagonist who goes crazy after reading too many romance novels. Not only does he become completely immersed in the world of knights, ladies, and valor, he fancies himself a knight errant, as well. He creates a woman of purity and wonder from a plain peasant who doesn’t know he exists. Despite his madness, Don Quixote is the ultimate romantic hero, so much so that he is a parody of himself. Though I adore the contemporary versions of the historical romance genre, Don Quixote reaches a place in the hero books that is untouched by any hero written about since. While the character of Don Quixote may be a bit off-kilter, his absolute dedication to an ideal love makes all other heroes look like the silly ones. Finding that absolute dedication in a character has forever changed the way I view characters in other books. MEET THE AUTHOR Jennifer McGuire has a BA in Literature and Film, and a MFA in Creative Writing. She is a college English Teacher in the Bay Area. She's written and edited a long laundry list of things, and really enjoys seeing what people think and how they express it in words. She loves reading....and will read pretty much anything she can get her hands on. EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK Don Quixote essentially reads as observations by the main character of everyone surrounding him. It’s a look into the mind of a man who wishes life to be something other than it is, and then lives according to that fantasy. The real actions come not from the characters so much as the interplay between Don Quixote’s new mindset and the rest of the world. It was my great-uncle who gave me the book, and told me Cervantes liked to read romance. He told me that Cervantes wanted to write something that was reflective of that love of romance. After years of rereading the book and gleaning bits and pieces of Cervantes’ themes, it seems my great-uncle was on the mark. The book was well-received by the public and was reprinted several times in 1605, its first year, alone. It was translated into other languages within the first few years. Having read several different translations of it, I have found that they vary quite a bit. I haven’t had the chance to read it in Spanish, and would love to be able to visualize Quixote’s world in his native tongue. Even though it was popular, it took quite a while for Cervantes to write the second part of the book, which came out nearly a decade later. In the meantime, the book had already made a big impact on literature. At the time, romantic heroes were all over, but the character of Don Quixote changed the way the public received those other heroes. There isn’t much romantic literature to be found right after the publication of Don Quixote. It seems the public saw what I see now: Don Quixote is a hard man to top. Buy a copy to keep reading!

This book sets the Novelas ejemplares in the mainstream of Christian Humanism and shows that their narrative forms manifest the breadth of the Christian Humanist vision as much as does the more overtly revolutionary Don Quixote. Originally published in 1983. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.