Highly significant and original, Forms of Modernitypresents a wide-ranging synthesis of philosophical and theoretical receptions of Cervantes' Don Quixote. Rachel Schmidt impressively sheds new light on the book as a touchstone that has defined both the idea of the novel and the problem of modernity. Readers will find that Forms of Modernityholds their attention and interest extremely well while teaching them a tremendous amount.--Anthony Cascardi, professor of Comparative Literature, Rhetoric, and Spanish, University of California at Berkeley Forms of Modernitywill have a major influence on how we read Cervantes, the idea of modernity, and the genre of the novel. This major scholarly accomplishment provides understandings of theorists such as Bakhtin and Cohen that are often brilliant, and includes the best presentation of Schlegel's theory of the novel I have ever seen. Rachel Schmidt's rich knowledge of the literature on Don Quixote makes this a serious advance in state-of-the-art research.--Howard Mancing, professor of Spanish, Purdue University and President, Cervantes Society of America.