Don Quixote as Children’s Literature: A Tradition in English Words and Pictures

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Cervantes’s Don Quixote, recently chosen the world’s best book by well-known authors from fifty-four countries, has from its publication in 1605 been widely translated and imitated. Throughout the world quixotic and tilting at windmills are commonplaces, and the thin knight-errant and his plump squire Sancho Panza familiar icons. Critics regard Cervantes as the inventor of fiction, author of the first novel. Consistently judged too long and complex to be read in its entirety, Don Quixote, has always inspired abbreviations and adaptations. Major and now forgotten writers were deeply influenced by the Spanish author; in English they wrote chapbooks, satiric verses, essays, plays, and novels. Cervantes’s post chivalric romance inspired by the Counter Reformation in Spain became a classic for Protestant England that condemned Catholic medieval romances. Don Quixote, as children’s literature, informed by adult renderings, is a major but neglected part of this remarkable tradition. In extravagant Edwardian books, collections, home libraries, and schoolbooks, words and pictures by distinguished artists retold adventures both noble and mad. Recent adaptations-including comics and graphic novels-express current difference but also support the knight-errant’s affinity to children and lasting influence.