CERVANTES IN THE ENGLISH SPEAKING WORLD

Now, it is time to point out once more the influence of Cervantes on the English literary imagination, it is important to show to nowadays students the evolution of important literary issues and how English writers of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century responded to them by means of a selective reinterpretation of similar questions in Cervantes's writings.

Well-known among the issues that Cervantes's novel inspires are discussions on the burlesque, the nature of satire, varieties of irony, wit in relation to humour, and female subjectivity. What is not stated, however, is that these arguments are not based on the text of Don Quixote so much as upon the desire of English writers and critics to find Don Quixote in sympathy, for instance, with emerging new approaches to understand the world, how fiction and reality can mixed together in a text making some changes in the role of the writer and of the reader, in new literary aesthetics, etc...

For instance, during the eighteenth century Cervantes' novel is appropriated for aesthetic, and ultimately ideological, purposes in order to support a specific line of reasoning that has everything to do with the aesthetic debate in England but very little with Cervantes's historical text. The fact that the novel must be translated for an English readership makes its content particularly susceptible from the beginning to creative transformation.

Indeed, this appropriation manifests itself in a methodical distortion of the novel's Counter-Reformation ideology that both eighteenth-century  and English commentators overlooked or chose to ignore.

Some arguments focus on how English writers are able to make use of Don Quixote to advance their contemporary programme. Don Quixote is simply one of a number of powerful tools of which then contemporary writers benefited themselves as they argued for what prove to be the aesthetic arguments of high modernity. The aesthetic issues such as humour, wit, irony, and related issues are nevertheless intimately related to the overriding issue of the imagination, as an ideological as well as aesthetic issue.

Moreover, after searching through the web and reading for developing this project I can clearly state that Cervantes helped to reveal a modern concept of the imagination that emerges during the eighteenth century and which still remains.

There are demonstrates arguments in Don Quixote´s novel which supports many of the aesthetic arguments in England that bring us to the high modern period, the nature of Don Quixote's madness highlights the failure to understand the distorting dynamic of the English intellectual audience. The position made popular by eighteenth-century interpreters of the novel is that Don Quixote's madness is the product of an overstimulated imagination. While certainly convenient for aesthetes and intellectuals searching, expanding imagination, to avoid an uncomfortable empiricism of the type advocated by Locke and others, this position proves insufficient as a means of expanding the creative freedom of the mind.

Iván Torrijos ©