ABSTRACT
Don Quixote is a work that problematizes not only the distinction between what is true and not, 'real' experience and delusion, but also the formal means by which such questions can be raised. Eighteenth-century imitators of Don Quixote perceived that they would have to 'naturalize' his madness and go a different way to work with the law. To write prose fiction after 1750, then, was to be involved in an enterprise that was increasingly self-aware, that made revitalized claims to seriousness and divorced itself from earlier forms of writing, but also from English writing indebted to it. That such pretensions to moral weight were convincing was largely due to the colossal achievement of Samuel Richardson. At the same time as Fielding is rediscovering a Cervantic legacy for the novel, Samuel Richardson is also being hailed as a writer to whom the terms 'novel' and 'romance' are alike unsatisfactory in doing justice to the probability and conviction of his writing.
