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Scott Paul Gordon. The Practice of Quixotism: Postmodern Theory and Eighteenth Century Women's Writing. New York: Palgrave, 2006. 240pp. isbn: 978-1-4039-7444-0.
In The Practice of Quixotism, Scott Paul Gordon describes some key traits of the Cervantine hero in the protagonists of texts by eighteenth-century women. Some of these texts (chief among them Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote) have been the ground for much scholarship on picaresque characterization in the literature of the Enlightenment; others, like Sophia Lee's The Recess, are less commonly catalogued as quixotic narratives. Gordon supports his mode of analysis through an interesting interpretation of the conflict between fantasy and reality in the interiority of the quixotic character. In Gordon's assessment, the way authors position such characters in the texts points to a rather vexing relationship between subjectivity and perception. Since he chooses women's writing as his subject and draws on criticism of that writing from feminist recovery projects, his assertion that Enlightenment thinking views female subjectivity and perception as already picaresque supplements his examination of that relationship. In addition, Gordon argues that this relationship's complexities also energize much postmodern theory.
The female Quixote is perhaps the perfect solipsist as Gordon describes her; she believes unshakably in the reality of her own perceptions, however fantastic or ill at ease with the dominant worldview those perceptions may be. Don Quixote's belief in the infallibility of her own ways of seeing and interpreting the world makes her a site of mockery and derision for readers (and for her literary compatriots within the world of the text). The texts seem to support the assumption of an "objective" truth to which the don Quixote, unlike other characters in the narrative, is denied access, either through her...