Overview

In the view of the great Russian novelist Dostoyevsky, Don Quixote was the ""most perfect . . . of all the beautiful individuals in Christian literature"", adding that ""he is beautiful only because he is ridiculous."" He then gets to the mystical and mysterious heart of the novel: ""Wherever compassion toward ridiculed and ingenious beauty is presented, the reader's sympathy is aroused. The mystery of humor lies in this excitation of compassion."" Quixote's transparent goodness, his lack of guile, and his noble simplicity make him an object of ridicule in the eyes of the cynically worldly and yet evoke sympathy in those who admire his virtue and see something akin to wisdom in his innocence. It is in this light that we should read Don Quixote, seeing its protagonist as a holy fool with whom we should sympathize, even when he is at his most ridiculous.

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9781621647638

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Timothy McCallister is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Auburn University. His research centers on the intersection of religion and literature in early modern Spain. Figures of interest, in addition to Miguel de Cervantes, include Juan de Valdés and Garcilaso de la Vega. His current project is a book on Cervantes' providential worldview. Michael J. McGrath is a Professor of Spanish at Georgia Southern University. His research focuses on early modern Spanish life and literature, with special emphasis on cultural studies, the comedia, and Don Quixote. He is the author of nearly seventy publications, including Don Quixote and Catholicism: Rereading Cervantine Spirituality (Purdue University Press, 2020), The Art of the Game of Chess (Catholic University of America Press, 2020), the first English translation of Ruy López's chess treatise Libro de la invención liberal y arte del juego del ajedrez (1561), and A Primer of Pastoral Spanish (Catholic University of America Press, 2022). Kathleen Sullivan is an Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia. She teaches Literature of Western Civilization courses for the underclassmen and offers courses in British and American Literature for upperclassmen. She most recently published an article on Robert Frost's poetry, yet most of her writing and research is focused on Jane Austen and British novels of the nineteenth century. Michael Dominic Taylor works as a Teaching Fellow and Dean of Students at the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in Merrimack, New Hampshire. He has earned degrees from the United States, Italy, Spain, and Poland in biology and environmental studies, bioethics, and philosophy. In 2021, the Joseph Ratzinger Foundation (Vatican) and the Francisco de Vitoria University (Madrid) awarded him with the Expand Reason Prize for his book The Foundations of Nature: Metaphysics of Gift for an Integral Ecological Ethic (Cascade Books, 2020). Today he writes, speaks, and teaches on the humanities, metaphysics, bioethics, ecology, and the history of Spain. R. V. Young is Professor Emeritus of English at North Carolina State University. He co-founded the John Donne Journal and for twenty-five years served as co-editor. Subsequently, he served as editor of the quarterly review Modern Age. He is the author of numerous articles and reviews, and his most recent book is Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization (Catholic University of America Press, 2022). He is currently at work on the Ignatius Critical Edition of John Milton's Paradise Lost. Joseph Pearce is the author of numerous literary studies, including Literary Converts, The Quest for Shakespeare, and Shakespeare on Love, as well as biographies on Oscar Wilde, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He is the general editor of the Ignatius Critical Editions series.

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