Reprint of the original, first published in 1841.

The Female Quixote completely inverts the adventures of Don Quixote. While the latter mistook himself for the hero of a Romance, Arabella believes she is the fair maiden. She believes she can fell a hero with one look and that any number of lovers would be happy to suffer on her behalf.

Using postmodern theory, The Practice of Quixotism explores eighteenth-century women's texts that use quixote narratives, which typically demand that individuals purge their minds of internalized fictions to insist instead that the reality we encounter is inevitably mediated by the texts we have read.

Reading novels by the Fieldings, Lennox and Sterne alongside the works of Adam Smith, Motooka argues that the legacy of sentimentalism is the social sciences of today.

Quixotic Fictions of the USA 1792-1815 explores the conflicted and conflicting interpretations of Don Quixote available to and deployed by disenchanted writers of America's new republic. It argues that the legacy of Don Quixote provided an ambiguous cultural icon and ironic narrative stance that enabled authors to critique with impunity the ideological fictions shoring up their fractured republic. Close readings of works such as Modern Chivalry, Female Quixotism, and The Algerine Captive reveal that the fiction from this period repeatedly engaged with Cervantes's narrative in order to test competing interpretations of republicanism, to interrogate the new republic's multivalent crises of authority, and to question both the possibility and the desirability of an isolationist USA and an autonomous 'American' literature. Sarah Wood's study is the first book-length publication to examine the role of Don Quixote in early American literature. Exploring the extent to which the literary culture of North America was shaped by a diverse range of influences, it addresses an issue of growing concern to scholars of American history and literature. Quixotic Fictions reaffirms the global reach of Cervantes's influence and explores the complex, contradictory ways in which Don Quixote helped shape American fiction at a formative moment in its development.

This book is a study of depictions of health and sickness in the early American novel, 1787-1808. These texts reveal a troubling tension between the impulse toward social affection that built cohesion in the nation and the pursuit of self-interest that was considered central to the emerging liberalism of the new Republic. Good health is depicted as an extremely positive social value, almost an a priori condition of membership in the community. Characters who have the “glow of health” tend to enjoy wealth and prestige; those who become sick are burdened by poverty and debt or have made bad decisions that have jeopardized their status. Bodies that waste away, faint, or literally disappear off of the pages of America’s first fiction are resisting the conditions that ail them; as they plead for their right to exist, they draw attention to the injustice, apathy, and greed that afflict them.