num_pages: 288
description: 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 Quixotes 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 todays 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. 8 pages of illustrations
language: English
title: Quixote: The Novel and the World
publisher: W. W. Norton & Company