Edwin Williamson, M.A., (M.A., Ph.D., Edinburgh), Comendador de la Orden de Isabel la Católica
King Alfonso XIII Professor Emeritus of Spanish Studies, Emeritus Fellow of Exeter College
Corresponding Fellow of the Real Academia Española
Research
Edwin Williamson is a literary scholar, biographer, and historian. His research interests are in the literature, culture, and history of Spanish America as well as early-modern Spain. He is the author of The Penguin History of Latin America, which has been translated into Spanish (Historia de América Latina, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2014) and Portuguese (História da América Latina, Edições 70, 2012). His biography, Borges: A Life (Viking, 2004) has been translated into seven languages (Spanish ed. Borges: una vida, Seix Barral, 2006). He has published extensively on the Hispanic Golden Age, and especially on Cervantes. He has lectured widely in Spain, Latin America, and Europe, and has been a visiting professor at Stanford, Cornell, the University of Colorado at Denver, and the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil. In 2015 he was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship to write a critical study of Cervantes's evolution as a writer during the last three decades of his life (1585-1616), with a particular focus on the process of composition of his great masterpiece Don Quixote in the context of his other writings and the Spanish culture and society of his time. He is one of four co-directors of an international research network on "Authority and Power in Early-Modern Spain", comprising literary scholars and historians from Oxford, Universidad de Navarra, Westfäliches Wilhelms-Universtät Münster, and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III (2007-present). In 2016 he organized in Oxford an Anglo-Spanish symposium to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the deaths of both Cervantes and Shakespeare, with the participation of six Spanish Shakespeare scholars and six British cervantistas; it was repeated in Spanish as Diálogos Hispano-Británicos at the University of Alcalá de Henares, Cervantes’s birthplace.
Selected Publications
Books:
Ed., The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 246 pp.
Ed. with J. M. Usunáriz, La autoridad política y el poder de las letras en el Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2013), 228 pp.
The Penguin History of Latin America, new and expanded edition (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 705 pp.
Ed., with I. Arellano, C. Strosetzki, Autoridad y poder en el Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2009), 294 pp.
Ed., with J. Robbins, Cervantes: Essays in Memory of E.C. Riley (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 271 pp.
Borges: A Life (New York and London : Viking, 2004; in paperback, 2005), 574 pp.
Ed., Cervantes and the Modernists: The Question of Influence (London: Tamesis, 1994), 148 pp.
El Quijote y los libros de caballerías. Presentación de Mario Vargas Llosa. (Madrid: Taurus, 1991), 298 pp.
The Half-Way House of Fiction: 'Don Quixote' and Arthurian Romance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984; reprinted 1986), 278 pp.
Selected articles and book-chapters:
‘Avellaneda y la crisis de autoridad en el Quijote’. In El Segundo Quijote (1615): Nuevas interpretaciones cuatro siglos después, ed. Conxita Domènech y Andrés Lema-Hincapié (Madrid; Frankfurt: Iberoamericana; Vervuert, 2018). Forthcoming.
'La influencia y el poder del Quijote'. In Diez lecturas cervantinas, ed. Carlos Alvar y Abraham Madroñal (Alcalá de Henares: Instituto Universitario de Investigación Miguel de Cervantes, 2017), pp. 147-161.
‘Tiranía, autoridad y poder en el Quijote’. Insula, 843 (2017), pp. 17-20.
‘Los dos desenlaces del Quijote’. Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 790 (2016), pp. 68-87.
‘The Devil in Don Quixote’. Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 92 (2015), pp. 147-166.
‘El gobierno de Sancho y el poder del Duque’. In Anuario del Instituto Cervantes (Madrid: Instituto Cervantes,2015), pp. 107-122.
‘Remembering Pablo Neruda’. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, 47 (2014), pp. 248-254.
‘De un “mundo al revés” a un “mundo nuevo”: La prolongación de la Segunda Parte del Quijote y sus consecuencias’. In Comentarios a Cervantes: Actas selectas del VIII Congreso Internacional de la Asociación de Cervantistas, ed. Emilio Martínez Mata y María Fernández Ferreiro (Asturias: Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson, 2014), pp. 104-121.
‘Introduction’ and ‘Borges in Context’. In The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges, ed. Edwin Williamson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 1-4 and 201-225.
‘Crítica del poder y trastornos ideológicos: La estancia de Don Quijote y Sancho con los Duques’. In La autoridad política y el poder de las letras en el Siglo de Oro, ed. Jesús María Usunáriz y Edwin Williamson (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2013), pp. 157-181.
‘La transformación de Don Quijote y Sancho en la Segunda Parte’. In Cervantes y los cauces de la novela. ed. Emilio Martínez Mata (Madrid: Visor, 2013), pp. 33-65.
‘El joven Borges y Argentina’, Letras Libres (España), 128 (2012), pp. 8-19.
‘Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616): Don Quixote: Romance and Picaresque’. In The Cambridge Companion to European Novelists, ed. Michael Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 17-35.
‘El extraño caso del “grave eclesiástico”: Ortodoxia política y heterodoxia literaria en la segunda parte del Quijote’. In Ortodoxia y heterodoxia en Cervantes, ed. Carmen Rivero Iglesias (Alcalá de Henares: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos, 2011), pp. 173-183
‘“La bonita confiancita”: Deception, Trust and the Figure of Poetry in La gitanilla’. Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 88 (2011), pp. 25-38.
‘Borges y su visión de la Argentina: Historia y escritura’. In Jorge Luis Borges: Translación e Historia, ed. Alfonso de Toro (George Olms Verlag: Hildesheim, 2010), pp. 17-33.
‘La autoridad de Don Quijote y el poder de Sancho: El conflicto político en el fondo del Quijote’. In Autoridad y poder en el Siglo de Oro, ed. Ignacio Arellano, Christoph Strosetzki, Edwin Williamson (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2009), 241-266.
‘Borges y Bioy: una amistad entre biombos’. Letras Libres 81 (2008), pp. 30-36. Reprinted in Letras Libres, 125 (2009), 44-49.
‘Busqué las claves de la obra de Borges en su vida’. Revista de Occidente, 317 (2007), pp. 85-101.
‘Borges against Perón’, Romanic Review, 98 (2007), pp. 275-296. (Special issue on Borges, ed. Suzanne Jill Levine).
‘The Power-Struggle between Don Quixote and Sancho: Four Crises in the Development of the Narrative’. Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 84 (2007), pp. 837-858.
‘Jorge Luis Borges, lector del Quijote’. In Antes y después del Quijote. Actas del Cincuentenario de la Asociación de Hispanistas de Gran Bretaña e Irlanda. (Valencia: Biblioteca Valenciana, 2006) pp. 129-147.
‘Challenging the Hierarchies: The Interplay of Romance and the Picaresque in La ilustre fregona’. Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 81(2004), pp. 655-674.
Critical commentaries on Don Quixote, Part One, Chapters 18, 19, 20. In Don Quijote de la Mancha. Edición del Instituto Cervantes 1605-2005. Dirigida por Francisco Rico. Volumen complementario (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg. Círculo de Lectores. Centro Para la Edición de los Clásicos Españoles, 2004), pp. 53-60. Reprinted in the Real Academia Española’s fourth centenary edition, 2015.
‘Hacia la conciencia ideológica de Cervantes: idealización y violencia en El amante liberal’. In Cervantes. Estudios en la víspera de su centenario, ed. Kurt Reichenberger (Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 1994), pp. 519-533.
‘The Quixotic Roots of Magic Realism: History and Fiction in Alejo Carpentier and García Márquez’. In Cervantes and the Modernists, ed. Edwin Williamson (London: Tamesis, 1994), pp. 103-120.
‘Cervantes y Chrétien de Troyes: La destrucción creativa de la literatura caballeresca’. In Evolución narrativa e ideológica de la literatura caballeresca, ed. María Eugenia Lacarra (Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco, 1991), pp. 145-163.
‘El “misterio escondido” en El celoso extremeño: una aproximación al arte de Cervantes’. Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 38 (1990), pp. 793-815.
‘"Intención” and “Invención” in the Quixote’. Cervantes, 8 (1988), pp. 7-22.
‘Coming to Terms with Modernity: Magical Realism and the Historical Process in the Novels of Alejo Carpentier’. In Modern Latin American Fiction, ed. John King (London: Faber & Faber, 1987), pp. 78-100.
‘Magical Realism and the Theme of Incest in One Hundred Years of Solitude’. In Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings, ed. Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 45-63.
‘Romance and Realism in the Interpolated Stories of the Quixote’. Cervantes, 2 (1982), pp. 43-67.
‘The Conflict between Author and Protagonist in Quevedo’s Buscón’. Journal of Hispanic Philology, 2 (1977), pp. 45-60.