Don Quijote and The Intercontinental History of the Novel
Cohen, Walter
Early Modern Culture, No. 4 (2004)
Abstract
Don Quijote (1605, 1615) is often taken to be the founding moment of the European novel, a form that is in turn frequently understood to be a uniquely original invention of the western tip of Eurasia that has proven to be the dominant literary genre of the modern world. Although all of these claims can be disputed, few would deny Don Quijote’s significance for the European novel, the prominence of the novel form in European literature since the eighteenth century, or the global influence it has subsequently exerted. Despite my sympathy for the stronger versions of these assertions, in what follows I assume only the weaker. My aim is to position the European novel intercontinentally, not by showing that The Tale of Genji, for instance, is or is not a novel, but by considering the non-European dimension of European fiction. Inevitably, such a project relies on a certain view of European imperialism since the mid-fifteenth century. My own understanding, which seems to be broadly though not universally shared by Marxist and non-Marxist historians alike, is that European overseas expansion was primarily a product rather than a source of internal economic change — the development of capitalism — though of course the effect also became a cause.2 Here, too, however, I assume only a weaker, less controversial claim — that Europe, including eventually its most powerful settler colony, was engaged in continual if uneven imperial expansion from 1450 to 1900. Similarly, I subscribe to the linkage of the realist novel with both the middle class and with nationalism (though this connection does not at first glance seem to hold until the eighteenth century).3 But I assume only the weaker, commonsensical position that realism entails the serious treatment of everyday life. In all three instances, the weaker formulation allows the ensuing argument to work, whereas the stronger gives it greater resonance, at least in my view.
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