The professor from the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM) Esther Bautista Naranjo is participating in the research project "Transnational Quixote”, an initiative which attemps to translate and make a critical edition of works influenced by El Quixote.
The University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM) is participating in the research project "Transnational Quixote", an initiative funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities whose aim is to study recreations of the narratives by Quixote in different national literatures to make them more accessible and receive more recognition, as well as to encourage a transversal discussion. The research team is made up of ten professors from different countries among which is the professor from the Faculty of Arts on the Ciudad Real campus, Esther Bautista Naranjo, who will be in charge of studying, editing and translating the eighteenth century French work “The story of Monsieur Oufle”. This book shows the bizarre adventures and many misfortunes of a truly eighteenth-century "Quixote" who is obsessed with books and works on witchcraft, spells and comes to believe he is a were wolf. In this way criticism of the fiction by Cervantes, which revolved around chivalry, has been adapted to the world of mumbo-jumbo and idle superstition.
The aim of the research group is to better understand the myth of Don Quixote and the Cervantine narrative tradition, both from its development and evolution and its dissemination or spread across different national, linguistic and cultural dominions, from a transversal perspective. This enables a series of works which have their roots in Cervantine tradition to be brought into contact. This, in turn, invites discussion, not only on their common point of reference, but also between the different works.
Likewise, after three years of works, the contents of the studied and translated material will be available on the website www.quijotetransnacional.es, where, from 2022, there will be full access, to one of the main objectives of this research project: The Transnational Quixote Library (bQt). These works will be published both on paper as a specific collection from the Publication Service at the University of Salamanca, and as digital editions of the full works, which have been modernised as well as the preceding studies, which the Cervantine group will be in charge of.
UCLM Communication Office Ciudad Real, 13th of October 2021