ABSTRACT
The publication of Cervantes's Don Quixote and its translation into English is a major watershed in the history of the romance. In The Knight of the Burning Pestle, a year or so earlier, Beaumont and Fletcher exploited the absurd disproportion between the old ideal of chivalric romance and the practice of modem everyday life. Much earlier in its history the romance had survived translation from verse into prose; its ideal vision remained intact. Don Quixote represents the idealization of the self, the refusal to doubt inner experience, the tendency to base any interpretation of the world upon personal will, imagination and desire, not upon an empirical and social consensus of experience. By the middle of the eighteenth century the French romances had all the tawdriness of a recently bygone fashion, and the romance form was seen by contemporary writers as a thing of the past.
