Tilting at the Windmills of the Eighteenth Century: Representations of British Quixotism in Joseph Andrews, The Female Quixote and The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Abstract

Don Quixote (1605) by Miguel de Cervantes, widely regarded as the first example of the modern novel, has always been a rich source of both formal and contextual impact on the world cultures and literatures. Despite its late arrival to Britain in the seventeenth century, quixotism can be defined as a method that utilizes the influence of Don Quixote and Cervantes in character formation, style, satiric tone and adventures of works. With the advent of the novel genre, the influence transforms into a topos in the eighteenth- century literary works of the age through its prevalent use with diverse ends. In the quixotic novels of the period, writers give voice to their own British quixotes and the problems they have derived from Spanish knight. Within the context of the period, these characters attempt to live according to their quixotic principles, but they fail to conform to the social and cultural codes of the time, thus like their predecessor, they find themselves in a constant struggle with those codes. In this dissertation, Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding, The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox, and The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne are three of the novels whose quixotic characters and contextual elements can be studied to discern how the British authors developed and appropriated the concept with regard to their distinct aims. Moreover, another common point of these novels is their criticism of the codes of the age by utilizing quixotic characters who attack the century’s entrenched norms of literature, gender, propriety and reason. To this end, this dissertation proposes to argue the development and appropriation of British quixotism in the selected novels and it aims to shed light on the social and cultural criticism of the age presented in the novels through the method borrowed from Cervantes.