| dc.description.abstract | Literary critics have demonstrated that Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605, 1615) served as a template for eighteenth-century British writers to transcend the literary mode of romance and to create modern, realist fiction. In this dissertation, I argue that British authors also found in Don Quixote a model for certain affinities between romance and realism, rather than a mere relationship of opposition. In Cervantes’s novel, the combination of the protagonist’s imagination with the reality of seventeenth-century Spain not only results in ridicule for him and his knightly aspirations, but said mixture is also capable of redirecting the targets of the irony to certain aspects of his contemporaneous world. These include the excesses produced by the law at the time and the cruelty and idleness of some secondary characters who take advantage of a naïve protagonist who cannot defend himself. In the mid-eighteenth century, British writers such as Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne blended realism with the imagination of romance to produce effects other than ridicule and to reorient the irony traditionally associated with quixotic figures in England. Fielding and Sterne in Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tristram Shandy (1759-1767), respectively, relied on certain alliances between the realistic and imaginative literary modes to unsettle previous habits of reading quixotic characters through the lens of satire. An additional aspect of the codependency between romance and realism appears in the subplots of Cardenio in Don Quixote and of Mr. Macartney in Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778). Here, the strategies of romance collaborate with realism in the creation of a narratological experience that combines suspense with surprise, which seems to help keep readers interested in these interpolated stories. The way in which Fielding, Sterne, and Burney engage with romance and realism illuminates certain aspects of the generic interplay in Don Quixote, and it expands our understanding of the legacy of Cervantes’s novel in eighteenth-century England. | |
