Notes

1. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. John Rutherford (London: Penguin, 2003), 1.10.81. All subsequent references to Cervantes’s Don Quixote are to this edition and are cited in the text by part, chapter, and page number.

2. Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones, ed. and trans. Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Grove, 1994), 48–49.

3. In Wendy Motooka’s The Age of Reasons: Quixotism, Sentimentalism, and Political Economy in Eighteenth- Century Britain (New York: Routledge, 1998), Motooka describes Quixote as “an embodiment of radical political difference,” defining “quixotism” as “epistemological problems that become political problems, or political problems that turn out to have their basis in epistemological divisions” (4). This is the most incisive characterization of quixotism we have. In this book I argue, however, that quixotism is not simply political difference nor a failure of the senses, but an outlook arising from exceptionalism, not simply misprision or epistemological difference.

4. Sarah F. Wood, Quixotic Fictions of the USA, 1792–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), vi. Fielding’s review appears in the Covent-Garden Journal, vol. 1, ed. Gerard Edward Jensen [New Haven, 1915], 279–82, 279. Another study that takes a primarily taxonomic approach to quixotism is J. A. G. Ardila, The Cervantean Heritage: Reception and Influence of Cervantes in Britain (Oxford: Legenda, 2009).

5. Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 151–211.

6. Thomas Scanlan, “Review of Quixotic Fictions of the USA, 1792–1815,” Early American Literature 43 (2008): 237.

7. John Skinner, “Don Quixote in 18th-Century England: A Study in Reader Response,” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 7 (1987): 45. As Skinner notes, eighteenth-century readers tended to focus “more readily on the actual character of Don Quixote.”

8. Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on “Don Quixote,” ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt, 1983), 27–28.

9. Roberto González Echevarría, Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”: A Casebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 4.

10. Schmitt has been an influential political theorist whose work cannot be ignored for the purpose of this study. I acknowledge, however, that he was sympathetic to and involved in Nazi authoritarianism, a legacy to be reckoned with and most certainly not celebrated.

11. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, ed. Margaret Dalziel (1752; New York: Oxford, 1998), 311. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text.

1. Schmitt’s definition of the sovereign appears in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 5. For a history of American exceptionalism, see the work of Jack Green, especially in The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492–1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

2. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 72–73.

3. Paul Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 9, 125.

4. Joseph Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 5–6.

5. Kahn, Political Theology, 8–9.

6. Donald Pease, “Re-Thinking ‘American Studies after US Exceptionalism,’ ” American Literary History 21 (2009): 19–20.

7. Jack P. Greene, The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 4–5.

8. Octavio Paz, Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature, trans. Helen Lane (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), 132.

9. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 22.

10. See, for example, James Chace, “Quixotic America,” World Policy Journal 20 (2003): 7–15. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson famously kept and enjoyed copies of Don Quixote in the late eighteenth century.

11. Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” in The Novel, vol. 1: History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Franco Moretti, 336–63 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 338.

12. Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” 339.

13. Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” 340.

14. Motooka, The Age of Reasons, 2.

15. Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” 347.

16. As Dalziel tells us in her explanatory notes, people even suspected that Samuel Johnson wrote this portion of Lennox’s novel for her. John Mitford, editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine (August 1843), was the first to float this notion (414).

17. Sarah Kareem, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 21.

18. Diana de Armas Wilson, Cervantes, The Novel, and the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 20.

19. Wilson, Cervantes, The Novel, and the New World, 22–23.

20. Clarence Haring, The Spanish Empire in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), 27–28.

21. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 3 (London: Collins, 1984), 352.

22. Brinley Thomas, The Industrial Revolution and the Atlantic Economy (London: Routledge, 1993), 37.

23. Thomas, The Industrial Revolution and the Atlantic Economy, 41.

24. Michael Gilmore, “Eighteenth-Century Oppositional Ideology and Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry,” Early American Literature 13 (1978): 184.

25. Stephen Shapiro, The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 1.

26. Gilmore, “Eighteenth-Century Oppositional Ideology,” 183–84.

1. Susan Manning, Poetics of Character (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), xii.

2. Manning, Poetics of Character, xiii.

3. Alexander Parker, Literature and the Delinquent: The Picaresque Novel in Spain and Europe 1599–1753 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967), 19.

4. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 338.

5. Roberto González Echevarría, Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 218.

6. Nabokov, Lectures, 27–28.

7. Tobias Smollett, translator’s note to The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, trans. Smollett (London, 1755), xxi. As the pages of Smollett’s prefatory material to his 1755 translation are unnumbered, I have counted them from the beginning and assigned them numbers for citation purposes.

8. Tobias Smollett, The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, ed. Robert Folkenflik and Barbara Laning-Fitzpatrick (1760–62; Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 62. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text.

9. Edmund Gayton, Pleasant Notes upon Don Quixot (London, 1654), i.

1. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel: 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1999), 171–72.

2. Barbara Fuchs, The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 1.

3. Mary Helen McMurran, The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 2.

4. Miguel de Cervantes, The History of the Valorous and Wittie Knight-Errant, Don Quixote of La Mancha, trans. Thomas Shelton (London, 1612), 3.

5. Shelton, dedication to Don Quixote, by Cervantes, trans. Shelton (1612).

6. Thomas Shelton, dedication to The History of the Valorous and Wittie Knight-Errant, Don Quixote of La Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes, trans. Shelton (London, 1620).

7. Shelton, dedication to Don Quixote, by Cervantes, trans. Shelton (1612).

8. Shelton, dedication to Don Quixote, by Cervantes, trans. Shelton (1612).

9. John Phillips, Dialogue, in The History of the Most Renowned Don Quixote of La Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes, trans. Phillips (London, 1687), i. The pages of Phillips’s opening epistle to the reader are unnumbered, so I have counted them from the beginning and assigned them numbers for the purposes of citation.

10. Phillips, Dialogue, in Don Quixote, by Cervantes, trans. Phillips, i–ii.

11. Phillips, Dialogue, in Don Quixote, by Cervantes, trans. Phillips, ii.

12. The translator’s name was Charles Jervas, but because of a printer’s error, the surname appeared as “Jarvis.” Consequently, the text is frequently referred to as the “Jarvis translation.”

13. Miguel de Cervantes, The History of the Renowned Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. Peter Motteaux (London, 1700).

14. Charles Jarvis, translator’s preface to The Life and Exploits of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes, trans. Jarvis (London, 1742), iv.

15. Julie Candler Hayes, “Eighteenth-Century English Translations of Don Quixote,” in The Cervantean Heritage: Reception and Influence of Cervantes in Britain, ed. J. A. G. Ardila (Oxford: Legenda, 2009), 66.

16. Miguel de Cervantes, The Life and Notable Adventures of That Renown’d Knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha, Merrily Translated into Hudibrastick Verse, trans. Edward Ward (London, 1711–12).

17. Jarvis, dedication to John Lord Carteret in Don Quixote, by Cervantes, trans. Jarvis, v.

18. Jarvis, dedication to John Lord Carteret in Don Quixote, by Cervantes, trans. Jarvis, iv.

19. Jarvis, translator’s preface, Don Quixote, by Cervantes, trans. Jarvis, vi–vii.

20. Jarvis, translator’s preface, Don Quixote, by Cervantes, trans. Jarvis, xxii.

21. Smollett, translator’s note, in Don Quixote, by Cervantes, trans. Smollett.

22. David Brewer, The Afterlife of Character, 1726–1825 (State College: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 17. Brewer calls the “social canon” “that unwritten list of texts kept alive in the hearts and minds of myriad individual readers from generation to generation.”

1. Manning, Poetics of Character, xii–xiii.

2. Manning, Poetics of Character, 13–14.

3. Jed Rasula, “When the Exception Is the Rule: Don Quixote as Incitement to Literature,” Comparative Literature 51, no. 2 (1999): 146.

4. Brewer, The Afterlife of Character, 22.

5. I draw this term in part from Brewer’s discussion of character ontology as a consequence of character reproduction in The Afterlife of Character, 1726–1825, 10. Brewer also uses “sociability” to describe how prominent characters engender common feeling and sociable practices among a community of readers who know of and become invested in the lives of such characters (14).

6. James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. Pat Rogers (1791; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 36.

7. Jorge Luis Borges, Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature, trans. Katherine Silver, ed. Martín Arias and Martin Hardis (New York: New Directions, 2013), 95.

8. Qtd. in Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” 350.

9. Brewer, The Afterlife of Character, 3.

10. Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” 355.

11. Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 35.

12. Brewer, The Afterlife of Character, 17.

13. Lynch, The Economy of Character 6.

14. Brewer, The Afterlife of Character, 14.

15. Lynch, The Economy of Character, 76, 57.

16. Lynch, The Economy of Character, 47–48.

17. Lynch, The Economy of Character, 47–48.

18. Henry Fielding, Don Quixote in England (London, 1734), 14.

19. Hayes, “Eighteenth-Century English Translations of Don Quixote,” 69–71.

20. Lynch, The Economy of Character, 6.

21. Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” 355–56.

22. Brewer, The Afterlife of Character, 6–7.

23. Brewer, The Afterlife of Character, 110.

24. In “The Rise of Fictionality,” Gallagher quotes Peter McCormick’s argument that “fictional characters are surprisingly exhaustible as objects of knowledge since, unlike material objects, they lack the infinity of ever-receding perceptual horizons and, unlike self-conscious entities, they lack the inexorable privacy of ever-changing varieties of mental states” (358). Brewer considers Falstaff “inexhaustible” in Afterlife (86).

25. Brewer, The Afterlife of Character, 83.

26. Brewer, The Afterlife of Character, 78.

27. Brewer, The Afterlife of Character, 24.

1. Wood, Quixotic Fictions of the USA, 7–8.

2. Jeanne K. Welcher and George E. Bush Jr., Gulliveriana, vol. 1 (Gainesville, FL: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970), vii, v.

3. Jeanne K. Welcher, Gulliveriana VIII: An Annotated List of Gulliveriana, 1721–1800 (Delmar, NY: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1988), 51.

4. Brown, “The Quixotic Fallacy,” 260.

5. Evidence that Swift began a translation of Don Quixote, and probably contributed to a preface for it, appears in an essay by A. C. Elias, “Swift’s Don Quixote, Dunkin’s Virgil Travesty, and Other New Intelligence: John Lyon’s ‘Materials for a Life of Dr. Swift,’ 1765,” Swift Studies 13 (1998): 27–104.

6. Paulson’s inclusion of Amhurst’s comparison between Gulliver’s Travels and Don Quixote appears in Don Quixote in England: The Aesthetics of Laughter (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) as an aside in Paulson’s discussion of Hogarth’s Oppositionalist political prints. Curiously, then, Paulson’s brief discussion of the Gulliver-Quixote comparison appears in the context of a wider discussion of art and fiction as political tools, rather than as a discussion of Gulliver’s quixotism (136).

7. Studies like J. A. Downie’s “The Political Significance of Gulliver’s Travels,” in Swift and His Contexts, ed. John Irwin Fischer, Hermann Josef Real, and James D. Woolley (New York: AMS, 1989): 1–18, and David Bywaters’s “Gulliver’s Travels and the Mode of Political Parallel during Walpole’s Administration,” ELH 54 (1987): 717–40, were part of a late twentieth-century focus on Gulliver’s Travels as political allegory. More contemporary work in this lineage includes David Womersley’s “Dean Swift Hears a Sermon: Robert Howard’s Ash Wednesday Sermon of 1725 and Gulliver’s Travels,” Review of English Studies 60 (2009): 744–62; and Deborah Armintor’s “The Sexual Politics of Microscopy in Brobdingnag,” SEL 47 (2007): 619–40.

8. Christine Rees, Utopian Imagination and Eighteenth-Century Fiction (New York: Longman, 1996), 123.

9. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins (1726; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 15. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text.

10. Frank Boyle, Swift as Nemesis: Modernity and Its Satirist (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 29.

11. Here Gulliver hints at what will become his fate after joining and being exiled by the Houyhnhnms, forever altering his orientation toward humankind.

12. Though travel is a quixotic ideal in itself for Gulliver, the broader ideal that Gulliver quixotically seeks is described concisely by David Fishelov, “Parody, Satire, and Sympathy in Don Quixote and Gulliver’s Travels,” Connotations 12 (2002–3), as a quest for utopia, one of the primary objects of Swift’s satire, illustrated in part 4 in the Country of the Houyhnhnms. For Fishelov, part 4 “is mocking the genre of utopia, especially some of its underlying optimistic ideological assumptions concerning human nature” (130). Fishelov goes on to compare with “sympathetic satire” in Don Quixote the dynamic in Gulliver’s Travels that allows for a sympathetic portrayal of the Houyhnhnms’ utopia alongside the satirical current running through this portrayal (131). This analysis stops short, however, of tracing the connection between the predispositions of mind and behavioral modes of the quixotic, illustrated in Don Quixote, and comparable qualities in Gulliver, which enable the same kind of quixotic duality in Swift’s narrative that is present in Don Quixote: the quixote is at once a madman who does material wrong and a well-meaning, sympathetic character capable of drawing attention to the flaws of the people and societies around him.

13. Michael McKeon, “Parables of the Younger Son: Swift and the Containment of Desire,” in Jonathan Swift: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Claude Rawson, 197–215 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995), 199.

14. McKeon, “Parables of the Younger Son,” 200. McKeon calls Gulliver an “obsequious sycophant who seems always in the act of ‘prostrating’ himself.”

15. Neil Chudgar, “Swift’s Gentleness,” ELH 78 (2011): 139.

1. Royall Tyler, The Algerine Captive, ed. Caleb Crain (1797; New York: Modern Library, 2002), 18–19. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text.

2. María Antonia Garcés, Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive’s Tale (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005), 1.

3. Wood, Quixotic Fictions, 107–8.

4. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 300.

5. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 300.

6. Bruce Burgett, “Every Document of Civilization Is a Document of Barbary? Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Spaces Between: A Response to Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse,” American Literary History 20 (2008): 689.

7. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 300.

8. Wood, Quixotic Fictions, 109.

9. John Engell, “Narrative Irony and National Character in Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive,” Studies in American Fiction 17 (1989): 28.

10. Edward Larkin, “Nation and Empire in the Early US,” American Literary History 22 (2010): 514.

11. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 289.

12. Wood, Quixotic Fictions, 137.

13. Larry Dennis, “Legitimizing the Novel: Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive,” Early American Literature 9 (1974): 77, 79.

14. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 302–3.

15. Wood, Quixotic Fictions, 123.

16. Joseph Schopp, “Liberty’s Sons and Daughters: Susanna Haswell Rowson’s and Royall Tyler’s Algerine Captives,” in Early American Re-Explored: New Readings in Colonial, Early National, and Antebellum Culture, ed. Klaus H. Schmidt and Fritz Fleischmann (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 302.

17. Shapiro, The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel, 8–9.

18. Engell, “Narrative Irony and National Character,” 31.

19. Edward Watts, Writing and Postcolonialism in the Early Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 92.

20. Shapiro, The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel, 5.

21. Gesa Mackenthun, “The Transoceanic Emergence of American ‘Postcolonial’ Identities,” in A Companion to the Literatures of Early America, ed. Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 342.

22. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, “The Problem of Population and the Form of the American Novel,” American Literary History 20, no. 4 (2008): 667–85.

23. Mackenthun, “The Transoceanic Emergence of American ‘Postcolonial’ Identities,” 341–42.

24. Eve Tavor Bannet, “Quixotes, Imitations, and Transatlantic Genres,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 4 (2007): 553.

25. Armstrong and Tennenhouse, “The Problem of Population,” 668.

26. Armstrong and Tennenhouse, “The Problem of Population,” 672.

1. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Sanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (London: Routledge, 1989), 220.

2. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 200. By “Great Confinement,” Foucault refers to a seventeenth-century phenomenon, primarily in Paris, in which a significant portion of the population of the poor, unemployed, and criminal were institutionally confined. The English workhouse movement, however, practiced similar methods of concentrating the poor and indigent in areas of confinement.

3. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 202, 213.

4. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 215.

5. Christopher Parkes, “Joseph Andrews and the Control of the Poor,” Studies in the Novel 39 (2007): 17.

6. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Douglas Brooks-Davies and Thomas Keymer (1742; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 44, 207. All subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.

7. Walter Reed, An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic versus the Picaresque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 126.

8. Martin Battestin, The Moral Basis of Fielding’s Art (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 113.

9. Judith Frank, Common Ground: Eighteenth-Century English Satiric Fiction and the Poor (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 3.

10. Parkes, “Joseph Andrews and Control of the Poor,” 18.

11. Gilmore, “Eighteenth-Century Oppositional Ideology,” 182.

12. Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 175.

13. Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole, 176.

14. Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole, 181.

15. Battestin, The Moral Basis of Fielding’s Art, 26.

16. Mandel, “The Function of the Norm in Don Quixote, Modern Philology 55 (1958): 154.

17. Mandel, “The Function of the Norm,” 154.

18. See, for comparison, Ruth Mack, “Quixotic Ethnography: Charlotte Lennox and the Dilemma of Cultural Observation,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 38 (2005): 193–213.

19. Mack, “Quixotic Ethnography,” 193.

20. See, for example, John Trumbull’s “An Elegy on the Times” (1774), a retort to Oliver Goldsmith’s unflattering portrayal of America in “The Deserted Village” (1770).

21. Gilmore, “Eighteenth-Century Oppositional Ideology,” 186–87.

22. Bannet, “Quixotes, Imitations, and Transatlantic Genres,” 554.

23. Joseph Harkey, “ “The Don Quixote of the Frontier: Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry,” Early American Literature 8 (1973): 194.

24. Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Modern Chivalry, ed. Claude M. Newlin (1792–1815; New York: American Book Co., 1937), 257. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text. Cathy Davidson calls Teague Farrago’s “Id” in Revolution and the Word, 260.

25. Wendy Martin, “On the Road with the Philosopher and the Profiteer: A Study of Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry,” Eighteenth Century Studies 4 (1971): 249.

26. Brackenridge, Modern Chivalry, 270.

27. Bannet, “Quixotes, Imitations, and Transatlantic Genres,” 559.

28. Stephen Adams, “Philip Freneau’s Summa of American Exceptionalism: ‘The Rising Glory of America’ without Brackenridge,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 55 (2013): 391.

29. Michael Warner, Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 1–2.

30. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 260.

1. Jan Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 238.

2. Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 73.

3. McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, 73.

4. McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, 74. McKeon notes that two major critiques of Habermas’s understanding of the public sphere include questions about women’s access and the access of “commoners” and “plebeians.”

5. Critics have responded in abundance to the gender-subversive qualities of The Female Quixote and Female Quixotism for good reason. The gesture of changing the gender of Cervantes’s quixote was both radical and clever, allowing Lennox and Tenney to critique not just certain kinds of romantic idealism but also the sexist view, expressed by Henry Fielding in his 1752 review of The Female Quixote in the Covent-Garden Journal (no. 24, March 24, 1752), that romantic idealism was itself a particularly “feminine” quality (see The Covent-Garden Journal, vol. 1, ed. Gerard Edward Jensen [New Haven, 1915], 279). Eve Tavor Bannet argues of Lennox’s heroine in The Female Quixote that “in making Arabella a Dulcinea, Lennox transformed the latter from a figure who was, in her way, as much a passive occasion for masculine heroics as [Fielding’s] Fanny, into a controlling agent” (Bannet, “Quixotes, Imitations, and Transatlantic Genres,” 562). Likewise, Patricia Meyer Spacks has contended that Arabella is someone who, with “no opportunities for action and with little companionship imagines, on the basis of her reading of romance, a world in which she can claim enormous significance” (Spacks, “The Subtle Sophistry of Desire: Dr. Johnson and The Female Quixote,” Modern Philology 85 [1998]: 535). Cathy Davidson gives us a similar reading of Female Quixotism, arguing that it provides a feminist counterbalance to both picaresque texts featuring male protagonists and the titular conventions of various “female” texts in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 279). Sarah F. Wood has described American quixotes as marginal but subversive, as “alone and on edge,” and as “counter-cultural figures who most frequently inhabit the geographical and ideological margins of American society” (Wood, Quixotic Fictions of the USA, 125). This list of readings is not exhaustive, but representative of the critical focus on female quixotes as subversive and liberated figures.

6. This scenario is perhaps best described by what Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza terms “kyriarchy,” an interconnected social system in which one who might be oppressed or subjugated in one context (a woman within a patriarchy) could also be advantaged within another (a woman of wealth) (see Fiorenza, “Introduction: Exploring the Intersections of Race, Gender, Status, and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies,” in Prejudice and Christian Beginnings: Investigating Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies, ed. Laura Nasrallah and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009], 1–23).

7. Fiorenza, “Introduction: Exploring the Intersections,” 131.

8. Straub, Domestic Affairs, 4.

9. G. E. Mingay, English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1963), 270.

10. Ronald Schultz, “A Class Society? The Nature of Inequality in Early America,” in Inequality in Early America, ed. Carla Gardina Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), 212, 216.

11. Schultz, “A Class Society?, 211–14.

12. Christopher L. Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 238.

13. Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology, 253–54.

14. Jon Elster, Alexis de Tocqueville: The First Social Scientist (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 126.

15. Elster, Alexis de Tocqueville, 127.

16. Thomas Schmid, “ ‘My Authority’: Hyper-Mimesis and the Discourse of Hysteria in The Female Quixote,” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 51, no. 1 (1997): 21.

17. Bannet, “Quixotes, Imitations, and Transatlantic Genres,” 562.

18. Alliston, “Female Quixotism and the Novel,” 264–65.

19. Daniel Defoe, The Behaviour of Servants in England Inquired Into (London, n.d.), 17, cited in Straub, Domestic Affairs, 7.

20. Straub, Domestic Affairs, 4. See also Bruce Robbins, The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) for further discussion of the complex relationship between servants and their employer-families.

21. Brown, “The Quixotic Fallacy,” 251.

22. Quando caput dolet, caetara membra dolent, or, “when the head aches, other members will also ache.” This is Don Quixote’s analogy for explaining to Sancho Panza why, as knight-errant (head) and servant (body), when one is inflicted with suffering, they suffer mutually.

23. After Arabella recognizes her quixotic error, Glanville is “recovered to the free Use of all her noble Powers of Reason” (382).

24. Tabitha Gilman Tenney, Female Quixotism, ed. Jean Nienkamp and Andrea Collins (1801; New York: Oxford, 1992), 8. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text.

25. Betty is “preferred . . . to the double capacity of servant and confidante” (8).

26. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 275.

27. Brown, “The Quixotic Fallacy,” 264.

28. Brown, “The Quixotic Fallacy,” 263–64.

29. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 279.

30. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 279.

31. Wood, Quixotic Fictions of the USA, 168.

32. Lori Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 209.

33. Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance, 217.

34. Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance, 217.

35. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Martha Ballard and Her Girls: Women’s Work in Eighteenth-Century Maine,” in Work and Labor in Early America, ed. Stephen Innes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 102. Ulrich’s account is from records from women’s household labor in Maine.4

36. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 278.

37. Scanlan, Review of Quixotic Fictions of the USA, 237.

1. Paulson, Don Quixote in England, 184.

2. Anthony Close, The Romantic Approach to “Don Quixote” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 43.

3. Angus Easson, “Don Pickwick: Dickens and the Transformations of Cervantes,” in Re-Reading Victorian Fiction, ed. Alice Jenkins and Juliet John (London: Palgrave, 2002), 175.

4. Certainly Don Quixote also battles real injustices under false pretenses, as, for example, with the bound apprentice boy being whipped by his employer in part 1, chapter 4.

5. Paul-Gabriel Boucé, The Novels of Tobias Smollett (London: Longman, 1976), 93.

6. Mandel, “The Function of the Norm,” 161–62.

7. Boucé, The Novels of Tobias Smollett, 146.

8. Easson, “Don Pickwick,” 178.

9. Robert Folkenflik, introduction to Launcelot Greaves, by Tobias Smollett (1760; Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014), xviii.

10. Boucé, The Novels of Tobias Smollett, 20. See also Alice Parker, “Tobias Smollett and the Law,” Studies in Philology 39 (1942): 547.

11. Parker, “Tobias Smollett and the Law,” 556.

12. Boucé, The Novels of Tobias Smollett, 59.

13. Aileen Douglas, Uneasy Sensations: Smollett and the Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 117.

14. Douglas, Uneasy Sensations, 119.

15. Launcelot believes that Captain Crowe is mad, while Launcelot’s squire Timothy Crabshaw insists that his knight, too, is mad. Completing the circle, Launcelot accuses Crabshaw of being mad for “serv[ing] and follow[ing] a lunatic” (62).

16. Brackenridge, Modern Chivalry, 412.

17. Douglas, Uneasy Sensations, 121.

18. Easson, “Don Pickwick,” 185.

19. Boucé, The Novels of Tobias Smollett, 186.

20. Boucé, The Novels of Tobias Smollett, 186–87.

21. Easson, “Don Pickwick,” 179.

1. Christopher Benfey, “The Mysterious Mythmaker of New York,” review of Knickerbocker: The Myth behind New York, by Elizabeth L. Bradley. New York Review of Books, April 29, 2010, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/04/29/the-mysterious-mythmaker-of-new-york/. Benfey’s review includes the quoted excerpt from Irving’s published letters to the Post.

2. Irving published A History of New York under Knickerbocker’s name.

3. Washington Irving, A History of New York, in History, Tales, and Sketches, ed. James Tuttleton (New York: Library of America, 1983), 376. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text.

4. Jeffrey Insko, “Diedrich Knickerbocker, Regular-Bred Historian,” Early American Literature 43 (2008): 605.

5. Insko, “Diedrich Knickerbocker,” 605.

6. Daniel Williams, “Authoring the Author: Heroes and Greeks,” Early American Literature 30 (1995): 264.

7. Insko, “Diedrich Knickerbocker,” 609–10.

8. Insko, “Diedrich Knickerbocker,” 610.

9. William Hedges, “The Knickerbocker History as Knickerbocker’s ‘History,’ ” in The Old and New World Romanticism of Washington Irving, ed. Stanley Brodwin (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 158.

10. Robert Ferguson, “ ‘Hunting down the Nation’: Irving’s A History of New York,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 36 (1981): 30.

11. Ferguson, “Hunting down the Nation,” 23–24.

12. Ferguson, “Hunting down the Nation,” 25.

13. Ferguson, “Hunting down the Nation,” 26.

14. Ferguson, “Hunting down the Nation,” 29.

15. Charlton Laird, “Tragedy and Irony in Knickerbocker’s History,” American Literature 12 (1940): 168.

16. Laird, “Tragedy and Irony in Knickerbocker’s History,” 168.

17. Ferguson, “Hunting down the Nation,” 32.

18. Ferguson, “Hunting down the Nation,” 32, 36.

19. See Stanley T. Williams and Tremaine McDowell, introduction to A History of New York, ed. Williams and Tremaine McDowell (New York: Harcourt, 1927), xliv–li; and David Durant, “Aeolism in Knickerbocker’s A History of New York,” American Literature 41 (1970): 493. Williams and McDowell observe this critical focus in the introduction to their 1927 edition of A History of New York. David Durant understood by 1970 that the critical interest in satirizing Jefferson in book 4 had become so entrenched that it obstructed other viable readings of book 4. In many cases this focus persists today.

20. Ferguson, “Hunting down the Nation,” 28.

21. William Hedges, introduction to The Old and New World Romanticism of Washington Irving, ed. Stanley Brodwin (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 8.

22. Jeffrey Scraba, “Quixotic History and Cultural Memory: Knickerbocker’s History of New York,” Early American Studies 7 (2009): 389.

23. Hedges, “The Knickerbocker History as Knickerbocker’s ‘History,’ ” 154.

24. Scraba, “Quixotic History and Cultural Memory,” 409.

1. Essays in which The Infernal Quixote merits reference but not extensive discussion include Claire Grogan, “The Politics of Seduction in British Fictions of the 1790s: The Female Reader and Julie, ou la Novelle Heloise,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 11 (1999): 459–76; John Mee’s review essay “Anti-Jacobin Novels: Representation and Revolution,” Huntington Library Quarterly 69 (2006): 649–53; Jonathan Den Hartog, “Transatlantic Anti-Jacobinism: Reaction and Religion,” Early American Studies 11 (2013): 133–45; and Michael Taylor, “British Conservatism, the Illuminati, and the Conspiracy Theory of the French Revolution, 1797–1802,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 47 (2014): 293–312.

2. Susan Staves, “Don Quixote in Eighteenth-Century England,” Comparative Literature 24 (1972): 200.

3. William Godwin, Political Justice, ed. Isaac Kramnick (London: Penguin, 2015), 131, 480. All subsequent citations are to this edition, which is based on Godwin’s final, 1798 revision, and appear parenthetically in the text. I cite the 1798 revision in light of the publication of The Infernal Quixote in 1801, and thus with the objective of comparing with Lucas’s novel Godwin’s most recent revision of Political Justice.

4. Isaac Kramnick, introduction to Godwin, Political Justice, xi–xvi.

5. William Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age (London: Everyman, 1964), 202.

6. Kramnick, introduction to Godwin, Political Justice, xvi.

7. Kramnick, introduction to Godwin, Political Justice, xvi–xvii.

8. Kramnick, introduction to Godwin, Political Justice, xxiii.

9. Kramnick, introduction to Godwin, Political Justice, xl–xli.

10. William Godwin, Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills Concerning Treasonable and Seditious Practices and Unlawful Assemblies (London, 1795), 4–5.

11. Charles Lucas, The Infernal Quixote (London, 1801), vol. 2, 225. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text; references are to volume and page number.

12. The OED indicates that “quick-sighted” was typically hyphenated from the seventeenth century onward, which makes it curious that Lucas rendered it into one word, perhaps for the sake of punning. Smollett also used “quick-sighted,” perhaps also as a pun, in his 1755 translation of Don Quixote: “The boys, who are quick-sighted as lynxes” (OED Online, s.v. “quick-sighted, adj,” www.oed.com/view/Entry/156455?redirectedFrom=quicksighted).

13. Later, in volume 3, we learn that Marauder “ever felt himself elevated when he reviewed his own philosophy,” a testament to his exceptionalist attitude and the assuredness with which he broached the subjects of Godwin and Wollstonecraft’s views with Emily (3.103).

14. Claire Grogan argues that “no one novel appears to epitomize the genre [of female-reader-centered seduction novels] so well as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie” in “The Politics of Seduction in British Fiction of the 1790s,” 460.

1. See John T. Graham, The Social Thought of Ortega y Gasset (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 346; and Miguel de Unamuno, “The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho,” in Selected Works of Miguel de Unamuno, vol. 3, trans. Anthony Kerrigan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967): 3–326.

2. Both Motooka’s Age of Reasons and Scott Paul Gordon’s The Practice of Quixotism offer extensive explorations of quixotism’s implications for empiricism.