Eighteenth-Century English Quixotism and the Question of Benevolence Alexandru Dragoş IVANA University of Bucharest ABSTRACT Read through the lens of eighteenth-century moral philosophy works, Quixotism is viewed in the present paper as a political discourse meant to carry out a moral reform in a value-free world (cf. Alasdair MacIntyre). I am trying to argue that the hypertexts tackled here (Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews) and Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, as well as Henry Mackenzie’s novel The Man of Feeling can be regarded as types of quixotism which differ from their original hero, Don Quixote, in that eighteenth-century Quixotes see what all the others can see, but distort reality in order to reconstruct it according to their own precepts. In other words, they are producers of reality or, in Mackezie’s case, oversentimental Quixotes driven by unprincipled feelings in their inability to “read” the world properly. When talking about the rise of the modern novel in England, we face a conundrum related to the strict boundaries of the “new genre”. On the one hand, this is due to a major epistemological shift which took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, illustrated by the Scientific Revolution, Cartesianism, natural history, natural philosophy, all meant to reject, if not to put an end to, the isomorphic model of the Middle Ages and to promote a new Weltanschauung translated as the disenchantment of the world. On the other hand, this ‘New Kind of Writing written in the manner of Cervantes, which I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in our language’ (Fielding 25) (emphasis mine) makes Henry Fielding, ‘our English Cervantes’ (Borgmeier 43), be indebted to his Spanish model, being the first English writer to explicitly appropriate what critics have labelled ‘the first modern novel’, i.e. Don Quixote, whose legacy in eighteenth-century English literature was more than obvious. The present paper aims to focus on eighteenth-century English quixotic hypertexts in order to catch a glimpse at how the Spanish model of the novel designed by Cervantes became a method of writing novels in the age. What I mean by method is how quixotism was appropriated at the time in terms of social and moral practices, as well as political discourse understood as a weapon whereby the Quixotes critique the modern, secular, pragmatic, value- free world. I will endeavour to consider quixotism as morally and socially judicious, filtered through the moral theory works of the time. I link this type of ‘normative’ (Gordon 3) quixotism to social institutions like the public sphere, to the parody of reason which ‘satirizes rational authority as a political fiction only as rational as the authority of Don Quixote’s lance’ (Motooka 2) and to satire. Theirs is an effort to retrieve lost moral values in order to maintain a sense of meaningfulness in a ‘postepic’ world in which ‘man is unsheltered, deprived of the metaphysical comfort of the gods or of access to a natural context of desire, yet hard pressed to derive any ultimate meaning from the world itself’ (Cascardi 1992: 607). This effort inevitably turns into a policy and a ‘battle’ for reason. This kind of policy is explicitly theorized by romances in Lennox’s The Female Quixote, by universal benevolence in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, if not by benevolent tears in Makenzie’s The Man of Feeling. The method used by the novelists in question, encompassing manners and the hero as such (Welsh qtd. in Cascardi 2002:80), shows how this policy is put to use in order to reform the secular society depicted by satire or comedy and, at the same time, to turn the Quixotes into exemplary models that restore law and order and annihilate the ‘immanent meaninglessness’ of ordinary experience (Lukács 133). The choice of the above-mentioned novels has been made according to criteria related to the English canon (Fielding as an outstandingly accomplished novelist), politicised when it