A World of Disorderly Notions: Quixote and the Logic of Exceptionalism

by Aaron R. Hanlon

Overview

Shortlist—Oscar Kenshur Book Prize

From Jonathan Swift to Washington Irving, those looking to propose and justify exceptions to social and political norms turned to Cervantes’s notoriously mad comic hero as a model. A World of Disorderly Notions examines the literary and political effects of Don Quixote, arguing that what makes this iconic character so influential across oceans and cultures is not his madness but his logic. Aaron Hanlon contends that the logic of quixotism is in fact exceptionalism—the strategy of rendering oneself an exception to everyone else’s rules.

As British and American societies of the Enlightenment developed the need to question the acceptance of various forms of imperialism and social contract theory—and to explain both the virtues and limitations of revolutions past and ongoing—it was Quixote’s exceptionalism, not his madness, that captured the imaginations of so many writers and statesmen. As a consequence, the eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of imitations of Quixote in fiction and polemical writing, by writers such as Jonathan Swift, Charlotte Lennox, Henry Fielding, and Washington Irving, among others.

Combining literary history and political theory, Hanlon clarifies an ongoing and immediately relevant history of exceptionalism, of how states from Golden Age Spain to imperial Britain to the formative United States rendered themselves exceptions so they could act with impunity. In so doing, he tells the story of how Quixote became exceptional.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813942162
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	05/30/2019
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Aaron R. Hanlon is Assistant Professor of English at Colby College.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Tilting at Concepts
1. Quixotic Exceptionalism
2. Anatomy of Quixotism
3. Character and Front Matters
4. Relational Quixotism
5. Gulliver and English Exceptionalism
6. Underhill and American Exceptionalism
7. Adams, Farrago, and Civic Exceptionalism
8. Arabella, Dorcasina, and Domestic Exceptionalism
9. Launcelot and Juridical Exceptionalism
10. Knickerbocker and Reactionary Exceptionalism
11. Marauder and Radical Exceptionalism
Coda: Quixotism, Phenomenology, Epistemology

Editorial Reviews

" A World of Disorderly Notions is an original and substantial contribution to the study of quixotism in the eighteenth-century British and American novel. Hanlon argues that quixotism as exceptionalism is an ideology with an idealistic worldview to which everything must be assimilated. He succeeds admirably in providing fresh and stimulating new readings of quixotic works and in articulating a theoretical model that all other scholars in the field will have to take into account."

Catherine Jaffe

[O]ffers some of the most incisive recent criticism on the early history of the novel... Deserves a wide readership.

Eighteenth-Century Fiction

As Hanlon shows, the quixotic mode was flexible enough to critique everything from shifting class alignments to revolutionary Jacobinism to nascent American nationalism. This study suggestively demonstrates the capaciousness of quixotism as a critical and satirical tool, while also modeling how one can analyze a work’s cultural resonance beyond questions of simple influence.

CHOICE

Quixotism has been haunting the novel, literature, and politics for centuries—its ubiquitous presence often noted but never actually explained.  Aaron Hanlon is our ghostbuster, taking aim at the legion of quixotes with scholarship that materializes an "intellectual consistency where none has been found."  Animating the quixotic in all of its guises, argues Hanlon, is "exceptionalism": a claim to act and be treated differently made by any entity—individual or nation state—that reasons from the "exception rather than the example."  It's this logic that empowers quixotes, making them "not unique but self-replicating," and thus calling for Hanlon's remarkable intervention.

Clifford Siskin

Ambitious in scope and cogent in argumentation, Aaron R. Hanion's A World of Disorderly Notions: Quixote and the Logic of Exceptionalism presents a timely new perspective on Miguel de Cervantes's much-studied knight errant and his particular quality of mind, namely, the irrational rationality which we recognize as quixotism. Across the book's eleven chapters, Hanlon provides an impressive reassessment of Quixote and the quixotic mindset, suiting effective literary criticism to important questions of the present historical moment. One of the best contributions to transatlantic eighteenth-century studies to appear within the last few years.

Timothy Ruppert

" A World of Disorderly Notions is an original and substantial contribution to the study of quixotism in the eighteenth-century British and American novel. Hanlon argues that quixotism as exceptionalism is an ideology with an idealistic worldview to which everything must be assimilated. He succeeds admirably in providing fresh and stimulating new readings of quixotic works and in articulating a theoretical model that all other scholars in the field will have to take into account." "—Catherine Jaffe, Texas State University, coeditor of Eve’s Enlightenment: Women’s Experience in Spain and Spanish America, 1726-1839

"As Hanlon shows, the quixotic mode was flexible enough to critique everything from shifting class alignments to revolutionary Jacobinism to nascent American nationalism. This study suggestively demonstrates the capaciousness of quixotism as a critical and satirical tool, while also modeling how one can analyze a work’s cultural resonance beyond questions of simple influence. "—author of CHOICE

From the Publisher