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

Review
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, New York University, author of System: The Shaping of Modern Knowledge)

" 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.

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