Abstract
Excerpt: At the close of Part I of Don Quijote (1605), Miguel de Cervantes issues his famous challenge for another author to take up the writing of Don Quixote’s adventures where he had left off. After hinting at a third sally for the self-proclaimed knight and his squire, Cervantes defers an account of this expedition and ends his novel with an epigraph, a line slightly misquoted from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso:“Forsi altro canterà con miglior plectio”—perhaps someone else will sing with a better plectrum (I. 52). Whether intended ironically or not, this challenge was, notoriously, taken up by the pseudonymous Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, whose Segundo tomo had profound repercussions for Cervantes’s own sequel. And though Cervantes undertook to leave his protagonist sound of mind and soundly buried at the end of Part II (1615), literary resurrections have never ceased in the centuries since; the Italian epigraph has proved far more prescient than Sansón Carrasco’s epitaph. Among continuations and adaptations of Don Quijote, the turn of the twenty-first century has seen a conspicuous vogue for microfiction that engages with Cervantes’s novel.