'Spots unto the soul': reading bodies and imaginative impressions in eighteenth-century quixotic narrative

Abstract

This thesis interrogates how books were believed to imprint and impress themselves upon readers and readers’ bodies in the eighteenth century. The vast number of texts that adapt and rework Miguel de Cervantes’ novel, Don Quixote (1605, 1616), signals a pervasive fascination with the powers of reading in eighteenth-century Britain. This thesis will demonstrate how form in quixotic narratives is inextricable from eighteenth-century, gendered ideas about literature’s power to imprint the vulnerable reader’s body and soul via the imagination. Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) correlates female, impressionable reading with gaining sexual knowledge, setting up a template which later quixotic narratives adopt and respond to. Chapter One of this thesis shows how George Colman’s farcical afterpiece Polly Honeycombe (1760) addresses the theatrical and bodily elements of quixotic reading. It compares the impressions from quixotic reading to imaginative impressions envisaged within the actor’s malleable body. Chapter Two examines the way The Spiritual Quixote (1773) by Richard Graves, compares quixotic reading to religious enthusiasm, demonstrating the way quixotic narratives respond to contemporary debates about the relationship between spiritual knowledge and sensory impressions. In Elizabeth Hamilton’s novel, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) (Chapter Three), quixotism is a preoccupation with the imprints of the words themselves. Chapter Four discusses Eaton Stannard Barrett’s farcical novel The Heroine (1813), which explicitly conflates female quixotism with female authorship and demonstrates how the quixotic narratives’ descriptions of an embodied imagination stem from an anxiety about female production (textual and sexual). Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-67) (Chapter Five) playfully suggests that quixotic narratives about the dangers of impressionable female imaginations involve an anxiety about masculine impotence.