Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism by Stephanie O'Rourke (review)

Abstract

The political threat represented by the quixotic reader figure by the end of the eighteenth century, according to Dale, involves “enthusiastic, materialist misreading” (this is indeed where it seems that more attention to Austen might have complicated the conclusion [120]). Dale herself is a materialist reader, and in that sense a quixotic one, as she seems implicitly to acknowledge in her conclusion, albeit in a new sense. That new sense Dale has created in this book is a novel kind of quixotic reading that is learned and rational rather than enthusiastic, and which produces incisive and helpful readings rather than dangerous misreadings. In summing up the narrative arc the book has traced, she writes: “We can find no straight, progressive A-to-B line from literal to metaphorical impressions, from Allestree’s reader to Austen’s. We have been thrown instead, down some nonlinear route, dragged up and tugged along by philosophical, religious, and geopolitical tectonics . . . that is how we now do quixotic reading” (153). To paraphrase, we do quixotic reading precisely by standing in the slop, or rather being dragged through it, willy-nilly, by scholars like Dale.