18th-century British literature
A01=Jodi L. Wyett
absorptive reading
Author_Jodi L. Wyett
authorial cachet
authorship
British fiction
British literature
Category=DS
Category=DSK
Category=JBSF1
Category=JBSF11
Charlotte Lennox
cultural commentary
deluded heroine
Early Modern Feminisms
eighteenth-century
eighteenth-century literature
Eighteenth-Century Studies
Elizabeth Hamilton
empowerment
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
fan girls
fangirl trope
fangirling
Female Quixote
female reading
feminist literary criticism
fiction and identity
gender and authorship
gendered power dynamics
gendered reading practices
George Colman
heteropatriarchal norms
historical adaptations
history of the novel
imagination
impression
imprint
Jane Austen
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Laurence Sterne
Lennox to Austen
literary authority
literary backlash
literary market
literary trope
Maria Edgeworth
Memoirs of Modern Philosophers
novel reading
novelistic representation
passionate reader
Polly Honeycombe
professional women writers
quixotes
Quixotic Authority
quixotism
reading and reform
Richard Graves
Sarah Green
Spiritual Quixote
The Female Quixote
The Female Quixote and the Woman Writer
Tristram Shandy
women authors
women in publishing
women novelists
women readers
women's imagination
women's professional writing
Women's Studies
Product details
- ISBN 9781644534120
- Weight: 590g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 31 May 2026
- Publisher: University of Delaware Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Quixotic Authority reveals how deeply absorbed reading was inextricable from and essential to British women's professional writing and cultural commentary from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. The trope of quixotism, what we might today call "fangirling," had distinctly gendered implications, as the female quixote was almost exclusively associated with uncritical, overly absorptive novel reading, and often portrayed as a self-centered, deluded, ill-educated home-wrecker who must be reformed or punished. But what do we make of the fact that women wrote most of the depictions of female quixotes in novels of this period? Jodi Wyett shows that authors such as Charlotte Lennox and Jane Austen wrote quixote narratives to assert their own professional cachet as well as validate the passion and intelligence of women novel readers. Harnessing the power of the genre, they debunked proscriptive contemporary discourse denigrating both women and the novel. This book redefines the female quixote as a fierce fangirl both modeled in fiction and embodied by her creators.
Jodi L. Wyett is Professor of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. She has published numerous book chapters, as well as articles in such journals as Aphra Behn Online, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction, on subjects such as Jane Austen, Frances Brooke, and female quixotism.
