This course aims to construct an alternate history of the British novel under the sign of Don Quixote. Standard accounts of the “rise of the novel” in English often trace its development in parallel with certain philosophical and economic trends that culminate in the nineteenth-century with the middle class reading public; this narrative is inevitably tied to an aesthetic of realism whose leading advocates and practitioners constitute the canon of the English novel from Defoe and Richardson to Eliot and James via Austen. There is, however, an equally compelling—at times far more popular—countertradition that defines itself precisely though its resistance to the strictures of realism; it is a tradition that embraces the principle of fictionality in its complex dialectic with the “real.” 

Cervantes’s Don Quixote exerts a renewed and increasingly powerful influence on British writers starting in the eighteenth century, and we will examine three of the novelistic genres in which the shadow of the Don is particularly pronounced: comedy, romance, and the eccentric or parodic anti-novel. Authors, drawn primarily from the period 1760-1850, will include Sterne, Scott, Hogg, de Quincey and Dickens. This trajectory will be framed by the fantastic tales of Borges and the magical realism of Rushdie, two interrelated movements in twentieth-century cosmopolitan literature that are also deeply informed by and indebted to Cervantes and the romance tradition he spawned in English; together, they make a powerful case that the unreal and improbable can often be more profoundly “real” or “true” than bare reality.

For a full description of the course, click here.