Quixotes, Imitations, and Transatlantic Genres

Quixotic texts in the British Atlantic tested the cultural fit of common transnational models through the eruption into rural English or American localities of persons whose conduct and values had been fashioned by them. Fielding, Brackenridge, Lennox and Tenney also contrasted the absurdly "servile" imitation of their quixotes with their own more sophisticated techniques of imitation, to address questions of national difference raised by ubiquitous transnational imitation among the "polite." Imitative practices enable us to see how genres traveled between nations, and offer historically grounded transnational approaches based on the history of writing and reading.