The Cervanrean Heritage: Reception and Influence of Cervantes in Britain

by Ardila,J. A. Garrido

• ISBN13: 9781906540036
• ISBN10: 1906540039
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-11-25
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Many critics regard Cervantes's Don Quixote as the most influential literary book on British literature. Indeed, the impact on British authors was immense, as can be seen from 17th-century plays by Fletcher, Massinger and Beaumont, through the great 18th-century novels of Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Lennox, and on into more modern and contemporary novelists. 20th-century critics, fascinated by Cervantes, were moved to write what are now considered the classical works of Cervantes scholarship. Through their previous publications, the eminent contributors to this volume have helped to determine the reception of Cervantes in Britain. Together they now offer a comprehensive and innovative picture of this topic, discussing the English translations of Cervantes's works, the literary genres which developed under his shadow, and the best-known authors who consciously emulated him. Cervantes's influence upon British literature emerges as decidedly the deepest of any writer outside of English and, very possibly, of any writer since the Renaissance.

Author Biography

J. A. G. Ardila is Reader in Spanish at the University of Edinburgh.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. x
About the Contributors	p. xi
Cervantes in British Literature and Criticism
The Influence and Reception of Cervantes in Britain, 1607-2005	p. 2
The Critical Reception of Don Quixote in England, 1605-1900	p. 32
Cervantes and his Translators
The English Translations of Cervantes's Works across the Centuries	p. 54
Shelton and the Farcical Perception of Don Quixote in Seventeenth-Century Britain	p. 61
Eighteenth-Century English Translations of Don Quixote	p. 66
The Modern Translations of Don Quixote in Britain	p. 76
Englishing Cervantes's Exemplary Novels	p. 84
Cervantes and the British Novel
The Cervantic Legacy in the Eighteenth-Century Novel	p. 96
The Quixotic Novel in British Fiction of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries	p. 96
The American Sources in Cervantes and Defoe	p. 117
Henry Fielding: From Quixotic Satire to the Cervantean Novel	p. 124
Heroic Failure: Novelistic Impotence in Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy	p. 142
Tobias Smollett, Don Quixote and the Emergence of the English Novel	p. 151
Feminine Transformations of the Quixote in Eighteenth-Century England: Lennox's Female Quixote and Her Sisters	p. 166
Eliot's Casaubon: The Quixotic in Middlemarch	p. 176
Cervantes as Romantic Hero and Author: Mary Shelley's Life of Cervantes	p. 181
Dickens, Cervantes and the Pick-Pocketing of an Image	p. 190
Robin Chapman's The Duchess's Diary and the Other Side of Imitation	p. 196
Cervantes and the British Theatre
Cervantes on the Jacobean Stage	p. 206
'Last thought upon a windmill'?: Cervantes and Fletcher	p. 223
The Utopian in Cervantes and Shakespeare	p. 234
Quixotic Idealism Triumphant: Persiles and Sigismunda in Britain	p. 242
William Rowley: A Case Study in Influence	p. 249
Cervantes in Britain: A Bibliography	p. 259
Index	p. 269
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