Forever Young? Don Quixote at 400 Years

A presentation by Dr. Edward H. Friedman, Director, Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, and Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Spanish.

Edward Friedman has been editor of the Bulletin of the Comediantes since 1999 and is a past president of the Cervantes Society of America. His research has centered on early modern Spanish literature, with special emphasis on Cervantes, picaresque narrative, and the Comedia.

Friedman has explored how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish texts play against tradition and, at the same time, establish directions for future creation, by anticipating forms of contemporary fiction and drama, as well as the preoccupations of contemporary theory.

Friedman’s most recent monograph examines questions of realism from the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) to Miguel de Unamuno’s Niebla (1914). Friedman has published adaptations for the stage of Lope de Vega’s La dama boba and Unamuno’s Niebla, and a translation of Leandro Fernández de Moratín’s El sí de las niñas. Wit’s End was performed as part of Vanderbilt University Theatre’s 2006-2007 season.