Seduction as instruction: the female author as Pygmalion in long Eighteenth-Century quixotic novels

Authors

  • Miriam Borham-Puyal University of Salamanca

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.3217

Keywords:

Quixotism, mimetic reading, intertextuality, didactic novels, women writers, literary criticism

Abstract

Don Quixote played a crucial role in the shifts in taste and ideology that occurred during the long eighteenth century, being an instrument for authors to validate their own work in contrast with the production of others. New didactic works displayed the need to overcome the romantic supersystem that previous authors offered and even the patriarchal or colonial canon that had been established. The present article will focus on two women writers, Tabitha Tenney and Mary Brunton, who with a story of literary and literal seductions raised their pens against a non-questioned romantic integration in didactic novels and who even converted prior canonical cervantean authors in the origin of their heroines’ quixotism.

 

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Author Biography

Miriam Borham-Puyal, University of Salamanca

Dr. Miriam Borham-Puyal has authored the monograph Quixotes in Petticoats (2015), and has written several articles and book chapters on female quixotism and satirical quixotes in the long eighteenth century, as well as an entry for the Great Cervantean Encyclopedia. She is a teacher at the University of Salamanca, Spain.

References

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Published

28-11-2017

How to Cite

Borham-Puyal, M. (2017). Seduction as instruction: the female author as Pygmalion in long Eighteenth-Century quixotic novels. Journal of English Studies, 15, 7–30. https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.3217

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