"Many good things are provided for our instruction and delight in this handsome volume. Chief among them perhaps, and most keenly wanted in a collection of this sort . . . are sanity and wit."?The Romanic Review "A most interesting literary history of the Don Juan theme with the plays or works themselves serving as illustrations. Professor Mandel's general introduction and his shorter introductions and commentaries throughout the book are solid, wise, and engaging."?Robert E. Taylor, Renaissance News "This anthology is exhaustive and informative, expertly translated, and, by virtue of its subject, damned exciting."?Quarterly Journal of Speech "[The translations] are lively and . . . quite faithful to the originals. . . . The long introduction could well stand alone: fruitful in original observations on the nature of Don Juan, spirited, argu-mentative, and quite personal."?Armand F. Singer, Hispania The eternal Don Juan, the creation more than 350 years ago of a monk and dramatist known as Tirso de Molina, has appeared on the boards as a thinker and fool, hero and villain, but never as anything less than a great lover. Oscar Mandel's Theatre of Don Juan presents different aspects of the Don's spectacular progress through a half-dozen countries, epochs, and intellectual climates. Here are full-length plays by Molina, Moli_re, Shadwell, Da Ponte, Grabbe, Moncrieff, Zorrilla, and Rostand; excerpts from plays by Shaw, Montherlant, and Frisch; plus a dozen critical and interpretative essays. In his introduction, Mandel examines the legend of Don Juan.

Diplomats had multiple tasks: not only negotiating with the representatives of other states, but also mediating culture and knowledge, and not least elaborating reports on their observations of politics, society, and culture. Culture, according to the studies featured in this book, is defined as a complex sphere including aspects like systems of communication, literature, music, arts, education, and the creation of knowledge. This edition containing contributions from six conferences held in Vienna and Istanbul by the Don Juan Archiv Wien focuses on the complex diplomatic and cultural relations between the Ottoman Empire and Europe from the time of the early embassies to Istanbul up to "Tanzimat".

Aspects of Byron’s Don Juan is, in part, a proceedings volume from the 2012 conference held by the Newstead Byron Society at Nottingham Trent University. Speakers represented in the book include Malcolm Kelsall, Peter Cochran, Diego Saglia and Itsuyo Higashinaka. Topics range from the politics of Don Juan, and its treatment of women, to its comic rhymes. One section is devoted to the poem’s importance in the literatures of Spain and Russia, another to the vast catalogue of Byron’s prose sources (from cannibalism to cookery books), and a final section to the important role played by Mary Shelley in copying most of the poem for the printer. The editor’s introduction describes the enormous literary tradition of which Don Juan forms a vital continuation, from Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore, via Rabelais, Cervantes, and Montaigne, to the novelists Sterne, Smollett and Fielding, all of whom Byron adored. Another chapter concerns the differing ways in which Don Juan has been treated by other artists, from Tirso de Molina, via E. T. A. Hoffman, to Johnny Depp.

In this volume, Ian Watt examines the myths of Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan and Robinson Crusoe, as the distinctive products of modern society. He traces the way the original versions of Faust, Don Quixote and Don Juan - all written within a forty-year period during the Counter Reformation - presented unflattering portrayals of the three figures, while the Romantic period two centuries later recreated them as admirable and even heroic. The twentieth century retained their prestige as mythical figures, but with a new note of criticism. Robinson Crusoe came much later than the other three, but his fate can be seen as representative of the new religious, economic and social attitudes which succeeded the Counter-Reformation. The four figures help to reveal problems of individualism in the modern period: solitude, narcissism, and the claims of the self versus the claims of society. They all pursue their own view of what they should be, raising strong questions about their heroes' character and the societies whose ideals they reflect.