ABSTRACT
Henry Fielding's best novels evince his interest in Cervantes's Don Quixote, which he regarded as the canon of the novel. Fielding's novels stand out in the history of English literature, not only for their exceptional literary quality, but also because they illustrate the eighteenth-century eagerness to establish a canon of the English novel. Despite all the analogies between Joseph and Don Quixote, Fielding's character cannot be regarded as a proper Quixote, since he is not a psychotic monomaniac. Fielding presented two quixotic characters in Joseph Andrews: Joseph, whose reading of IKimeLi causes him to behave awkwardly; and Adams, who adopts a set of dated moral values. This novel thus conveys both the parody and the satire which Cervantes intended in Don Quixote. Fielding managed to read Don Quixote as a complex literary master piece in which Cervantes achieved what Fielding himself craved for: to have established a new genre that transcended the romance.
