Front cover image for Don Quixote in England : the aesthetics of laughter

Don Quixote in England : the aesthetics of laughter

Ronald Paulson (Author)
"Seldom has a single book, much less a translation, so deeply affected English literature as did the translation of Cervantes' Don Quixote in 1612. The comic novel inspired drawings, plays, sermons, and other translations, making the name of the Knight of la Mancha as familiar as any folk character in English lore." "In this comprehensive study of the reception and conversion of Don Quixote in England, Ronald Paulson highlights the qualities of the novel that most attracted English imitators. The English Don Quixote was not the same knight who meandered through Spain or found a place in other translations throughout Europe. The English Don Quixote found employment in all sorts of specifically English ways, not excluding the political uses to which a Spanish fool could be turned."--Jacket
Print Book, English, ©1998
Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, ©1998
Comedy
xx, 242 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780801856952, 0801856957
36884146
Imagination and satire : Quixote mistakes an inn for a castle
Imagination demonized : Swift
Imagination aestheticized : Addison
Satire : Sancho laughs at Quixote
Satire aestheticized : Addison's creation of a Whig ethos
Chivalry and burlesque : Cervantes "smiled Spain's chivalry away"
Comedia : the canon, the curate, and Quixote discuss romance
Burlesque and "grave irony" : Addison, Swift, and Milton
Graphic equivalents of burlesque : Quixote and Hogarth's Hudibras
"Affectation" : Fielding
Wit and humor : "Don Quixote's madness in one point, and extraordinary good sense in every other"
Wit aestheticized : Addison
Humor : Corbyn Morris and the fall of Walpole
A "character of perfect simplicity" : Parson Adams
Morality aestheticized : Collins's "Ode : the manners." Aesthetics : the taste of wine, the sight of Dulcinea
The two Dulcineas
Dulcinea and the virgin
"Dulcinea's" blemish
The blemish and the foible
Odd mixtures
Religion : The Parliament of death and the puppet show
Religion theatricalized : Addison
Laughter as release from religious gravity : Shaftesbury
Wit's razor : Shaftesbury and Swift
The aesthetics of Sancho Panza : Hogarth
The cathartic laughter of Mr. Punch : Fielding
Pamela, Parson Adams, and scripture
The hobby-horse : Sterne
Defoe and "the quixotism of R. Crusoe"
The female subject : Marcela discourses on beauty
The female Quixote
Catherine Morland
"The age of chivalry is gone."