Editor's Note

Abstract

Editor's Note Bruce R. Burningham As I write these words, the world is still gripped by the COVID pandemic, and we have spent the better part of the past year hunkered down, "zooming" along, and rethinking all the things we used to take for granted. With the increasingly wider availability of COVID vaccines, we are starting to see a return to normalcy, but what "normal" might ultimately look like down the road is still up for debate. Still, the world of Cervantes scholarship proceeds apace. This Spring 2021 issue of Cervantes begins with three studies of the impact of Don Quixote on an increasingly globalized world, one that arguably began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thomas Rendall's "Life is a Dream: Don Quijote and Honglou Meng" examines the way in which Cao Xueqin's eighteenth-century, five-volume Chinese novel repeats many of the discursive gestures made famous by Cervantes, including the use of metafiction and what Rendall calls the iconoclastic questioning of received ideas. Rendall's study of Honglou Meng is followed by David Reher's study of Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil and his 2019 film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. "On the Shoulders of Giants: Social Fear and Male Self-Sufficiency in Cervantes and Gilliam" focuses specifically on the motif of giants in both Cervantes's and Gilliam's work, and argues that, while Cervantes's giants metaphorically demonstrate an anxiety of the unchanging—and unchangeable—abuses of the protagonist's social class, Gilliam's giants offer a less pessimistic approach to social change. Reher's work is then followed by Rosilie Hernández's examination of "desengaño" as it evolves in three interrelated works: Cervantes's novel Don Quixote, and Dale Wasserman's teleplay I, Don Quixote and subsequent musical Man of La Mancha. Following these first three articles, we present two more that also focus on Don Quixote but from within a decidedly seventeenth [End Page 7] century Spanish context. Luis López González's "Deadly Gaze and Divine Object: Marcela's Representation in Don Quijote" re-examines Cervantes's famously "proto-feminist" shepherdess (who is featured on the cover of this issue) and argues that Marcela is also constructed within a dialectical tradition of courtly love that sees women at one and the same time as both divine and dangerous. López González's piece is followed by Javier Lorenzo's "Sonnets over Forts: Rethinking Lyric Insertions in the Captive's Tale," which specifically links the narrative of this episode to two sonnets (also found in the novel) that treat the loss of La Goleta to the Ottoman Turks in 1574. The Spring 2021 issue of Cervantes then turns its attention to two pieces that examine Cervantes's other work. Felipe Ruan's "Crafting Factual Narratives: A Genealogy of Miguel de Cervantes's Información de Argel" analyzes the Información in order to explore the relationship between "documentary" texts and fiction, while Robin Kello's interview of LA-based playwright Julie Taiwo Oni explores her twenty-first-century theatrical adaptation of El retablo de las maravillas into The Woodingle Puppet Show. This issue concludes with three book reviews: José Montero Reguera on Antonio García Berrio's Virtus: El Q UIJOTE de 1615; William Clamurro on Clea Gerber's La genealogía en cuestión: Cuerpos, textos y reproducción en el Q UIJOTE de Cervantes; and Aliza Levenson and Ana Laguna on Luis Avilés's Avatares de lo invisible: Espacio y subjetividad en los siglos de oro. Thanks, as always, to our Associate Editors and other peer reviewers for all their hard work, to Ana Laguna for curating the book reviews, to María Dolores Morillo for helping me proofread the entire issue, and to John Beusterien for helping me manage the submissions process. [End Page 8] Copyright © 2021 Cervantes Society of America