Description

Book Synopsis

Salvador Dalí illustrated Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote for the first time while living in exile in the United States in the 1940s, collaborating with Random House to produce a special edition that was published in 1946. Quixotic Quests examines the material history of this 1946 edition by bridging art history, book history, literature, and narratology, while exploring Dalí’s role as its illustrator and the reception of both by mid-century popular culture, art historians, and literary scholars.

Positing that much of Dalí’s life was quixotic in nature, the book investigates his quest to illustrate the novel with an unprecedented level of pictorial didacticism, despite challenges that the artist and Random House faced during and after the Second World War. It details his resolute passion to integrate surrealism with classicism, visual art with narrative, sexuality with sublimation, and privacy with public persona. Contrasting Dalíȁ

Quixotic Quests

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    A Hardback by Daniel Holcombe

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      Book details

      Publisher University of Toronto Press
      Published 5 July 2025
      ISBN-13 9781487555740
      978-1487555740
      ISBN-10 1487555741

      Description

      Book Synopsis

      Salvador Dalí illustrated Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote for the first time while living in exile in the United States in the 1940s, collaborating with Random House to produce a special edition that was published in 1946. Quixotic Quests examines the material history of this 1946 edition by bridging art history, book history, literature, and narratology, while exploring Dalí’s role as its illustrator and the reception of both by mid-century popular culture, art historians, and literary scholars.

      Positing that much of Dalí’s life was quixotic in nature, the book investigates his quest to illustrate the novel with an unprecedented level of pictorial didacticism, despite challenges that the artist and Random House faced during and after the Second World War. It details his resolute passion to integrate surrealism with classicism, visual art with narrative, sexuality with sublimation, and privacy with public persona. Contrasting Dalíȁ

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