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No one interested in Cervantes should miss Robin Chapman's The Duchess's Diary (London: Boudicca Books of Battersea, 1980), the imaginative (annotated) record, from her point of view, of the relationship between Cervantes and the model for the duchess in Don Quixote, Part II, and its effect upon her. As E. C. Riley has said (TLS, February 29, 1980), «this story shows a truer understanding of Cervantes than twenty books of criticism».
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The Modern Language Association will continue its series on Approaches to Teaching... (The Canterbury Tales, The Divine Comedy), with a volume on Don Quixote. Richard Bjornson (Ohio State) is to be the editor.
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The long-awaited Norton Critical Edition of Don Quixote in English translation (Ormbsy, revised), is now available: eds. Joseph R. Jones and Kenneth Douglas, 1981.
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Testimony to the importance of Don Quijote in the origin and development of the novel is given, yet again, but from new perspectives, by Walter L. Reed, An Exemplary History of the Novel. The Quixotic versus the Picaresque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), and Alexander Welsh, Reflections on the Hero as Quixote (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).