Appendix: electronic editions and scholarly resources

Summary

The state of the editions of Cervantes' works and of the critical apparatus for their study is rapidly changing under the influence of electronic means of archiving and disseminating information. The result is a staggering instability in the status of some scholarship. But changing modes of communication are nothing new to Cervantes.We should not forget that Cervantes himself wrote at a moment in history that was just beginning to feel the full impact of a related paradigm shift: that from orality to print. Contrast Don Quixote's visit to the printing press in Barcelona in Don Quixote, Part ii, with the episode in Don Quixote, Part i, where some of the characters gather at Juan Palomeque's inn and listen to the “Tale of Foolish Curiosity” read aloud. Cervantes' texts are now available in print, on CD-ROM, and on line. Print remains the dominant mode of publication among scholars, with work in English focused in the journal Cervantes (the Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America), but there is increasing use of electronic media in research publication as well as for the dissemination of texts.