It has been over twenty years since Cervantes Across the Centuries first appeared as a major contribution to the quadricentennial celebration of Cervantes’ birth. Even though long out of print it remains one of the few anthologies of criticism on Spain’s foremost writer accessible to the English-speaking world. The collection is an assortment of nineteen entries—some full-length articles written especially for the occasion, other chapters or excerpts from longer works written earlier. The editors have divided them into ‘“purely interpretive” studies, “the scholarly explanations of values and ideas,” and observations on Cervantes’ influence outside Spain. Many well-known scholars are included, such as Américo Castro, Joaquín Casalduero, Mario Casella, Benedetto Croce, Helmut Hatzfeld, Ramón Menéndez-Pidal, and A. Morel-Fatio.
The translations are of uneven quality, and the documentation of sources for the material selected is inadequate. Also important Hispanists have been omitted—Marcel Bataillon, Paul Hazard, and Salvador de Madariaga, among others. Nevertheless, this reprint (expanded to include a more up-to-date bibliography) will be welcomed by the nonspecialist public as a general introduction to basic Cervantine criticism up to the late forties. Of particular value today are the essays by Casalduero, Castro, and Casella dealing directly with the Quixote, as well as those by Harry Levin, Edwin Knowles, and Ludmilla Turkevich which treat of Cervantine influence in the United States, England, and Russia, respectively.