Don Quixote in England by Ronald Paulson

Don Quixote in England by Ronald Paulson

Seldom has a single book, much less a translation, so deeply affected English literature as 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. According to Paulson, a major impact of the novel and its hero was their stimulation of discussion about comedy itself, what he calls the "aesthetics of laughter." When Don Quixote reached England he did so at the time of the rise of empiricism, and adherents of both sides of the empiricist debate found arguments and evidence in the behavior and image of the noble knight. Four powerful disputes battered around his grey head: the proximity of madness and imagination; the definition of the beautiful; the cruelty of ridicule and its laughter; and the role of reason in the face of madness. Paulson's engaging account leads to a significant reassessment of current assumptions about eighteenth-century literature and art.

Paulson shows that Cervantes set the dominant model of comic writing in the period, and he explores the different ways in which writers lay claim to his workIn the early eighteenth century, the Knight of La Mancha often represents the madness of self-belief... An elegant chapter in the history of aesthetics or criticism. Times Literary Supplement

Ronald Paulson is Mayer Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins. His previous books include Representations of Revolution, Hogarth, in three volumes, and The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy, the last available from Johns Hopkins.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780801856952
ISBN 10	0801856957
Titel	Don Quixote in England
Autor	Ronald Paulson
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Verlag	Johns Hopkins University Press
Erscheinungsjahr	1998-02-20
Seitenanzahl	280
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.