ABSTRACT
Carlos Fuentes, writing a foreword to Don Quixote in 1985, suggests that ‘the modern world begins when Don Quixote de la Mancha, in 1605, leaves his village, goes out into the world, and discovers that the world does not resemble what he has read about it’.1 For Fuentes, as for countless critics before him, Cervantes de Saavedra is the gravedigger of the Middle Ages and a progenitor of the European Renaissance, the celebrated Spaniard who transcends national boundaries to become an international icon of cultural and literary enlightenment. For eighteenth-century Britain, engaged in the intellectual debates of European Enlightenment, Don Quixote was a foundational text, and changing responses toward the narrative and its knight can be used as a literary touchstone for measuring the broader cultural shift from Enlightenment to Romanticism. At the start of the eighteenth century, Don Quixote was read as an addled fool, the satirical butt of Cervantes’s enlightened satire; by the end of the century, he was more frequently seen as a Romantic hero in a narrative that exalted the powers of his imagination and lamented the passing of heroic chivalric ideals. At the same time, however, in response to unfolding events across the English Channel, this Spanish cultural icon was being used satirically by both radical and conservative British writers wanting to comment on the causes and consequences of the French Revolution. It was this promiscuously circulated and politically contested Quixote, rather than Cervantes’s Spanish original, who crossed the Atlantic with the influx of British literary imports into America both before and after independence.
