From Hispanophobia to Quixotephilia : The Politics of Quixotism in the British Long Eighteenth Century

Abstract

This chapter explores the reception of Don Quixote in the British long eighteenth century in the context of the tension between traditional political Hispanophobia and emerging literary Quixotephilia. It first speculates on how the former may have influenced the negative conception of Don Quixote dominating the seventeenth century, epitomized by Edmund Gayton’s Hispanophobic Quixote. It then focuses on political appropriations by Sir William Temple and Lord Carteret and how they negotiated this tension in the eighteenth century: through reinterpretation and canonization they turned Don Quixote into a classic, but, in so doing, they separated it from its national background and turned the text and even Cervantes against Spain. Finally, the chapter briefly considers a later, Romantic means of resolving the tension, Lord Byron’s Hispanophilic Quixote.