Inventing the Romantic Don Quixote in France: Jansenists, Rousseau, and British Quixotism

The evolving adventures and myth of Don Quixote from farcical social criticism to Romantic idealism and then melancholy. Hagiography, Jansenism and its interpretation of Pascal’s break with empiricism, Sarah and Henry Fielding, and Rousseau’s use of the Jansenist sequel to Don Quixote.

Clark Colahan is Anderson Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at Whitman College, USA. He is the author of several books and numerous articles on Spanish and French literature of the Early Modern period and the Enlightenment. He is the author of The Visions of Sor María de Agreda: Writing Knowledge and Power, the co-editor of Spanish Humanism on the Verge of the Picaresque, and the co-author of the English translation of Cervantes’ last novel, The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda.