The majority of the academic monographs published on the topic of the reception and the impact of Cervantes's Don Quixote on Anglophone literatures have focused attention on eighteenth-century English fiction. For example, Scott Gordon's The Practice of Quixotism: Postmodern Theory and Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing (2006); Wendy Motooka's Age of Reason: Quixotism, Sentimentalism, and Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2013); and J. A. Garrido Ardila's Cervantes en Inglaterra: el Quijote y la novela inglesa del siglo XVIII (2006, 2nd ed. 2014). Amelia Dale's The Printed Reader widens this line of research by introducing the notion of “literary impressions”—how literature is “impressed” or “imprinted” in the mind of literary characters, which in fact is, essentially, the very idea of Quixotism or, what Harry Levin calls the “Quixotic principle” (Harry Levin, “The Quixotic Principle: Cervantes and Other Novelists,” Harvard English Studies, 1 [1970]: 45–66). Yet, in approaching Quixotism, Dale's analysis concentrates upon the alignment in literature of “body” with “woman” analyzed by feminists like Elizabeth Grosz, and on the idea that impressions affect sensibility. Dale holds that “toward the end of the [eighteenth] century, when the idea of experimental ‘impressions’ became much less used, and in an increasingly metaphorical sense, there was, paradoxically, a more emphatic and definitive positioning of the impressionable reading body as female” (11). In The Printed Reader, she examines the “imprinting Quixotes” in Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote, George Colman the Elder's Polly Honeycombe, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Richard's Graves's Spiritual Quixote, and Elizabeth Hamilton's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers.

In the opening, “Introduction: Impressions and the Quixotic Reader,” Dale delves into the topic of immoral literature and women readers in eighteenth-century Britain. Having explained the concepts of “impression” and “imprinted literature,” Dale propounds her conception of what she calls “imprinting Quixotes” in the many “quixotic narratives” (14) published in that century. In her view, it would be difficult to produce a “catalog” (14) of quixotic narratives because the list of eighteenth-century texts that feature quixotic characters “proliferate[s] endlessly” (14). On that account, she notes that scholars like April Allison, Wendy Motooka, and Scott Gordon have struggled to establish “a systematic theory of quixotism” (14). In The Printed Reader Dale's contribution to this problem is, in her words, “to argue that printing—and particularly a gendered framing of this technology—structured eighteenth-century conceptualizations of quixotism in particular and reading in general” (14). In short, she explains, “to be quixotic is to be problematically imprinted” (15).

The question of “impressions” in “quixotic narratives” is a compelling one. Yet, the definition of quixotic characters as those personages that are “problematically imprinted” is fundamentally tantamount to what Levin and others refer to as the Quixotic principle. In her book, Dale sometimes mentions “quixotic studies.” This is quite an intriguing term and, by analyzing the imprinted reader in eighteenth-century literature, Dale seems to be intent on contributing to that field and overcoming the issue of the lack of a systematic theory of quixotism. Interesting as her analysis is, the question is not so much the extent to which she has contributed to the definition of that theory, but what we ultimately mean by “theory of Quixotism.” Aside from Dale's meritorious endeavors at analyzing English Quixotes, we need to reconsider the label “Quixotic studies” and, particularly, the directions of this area of research in the field of English literature—because Quixotism has been studied and successfully defined by countless critics who, inexplicably, are seldom or never referred to in present-day “Quixotic studies.” Some of the scholarly work crucial to understand the psychology of Don Quixote, Quixotism and what can be called the Quixotic “myth,” are not accounted for in, for instance, The Printed Reader—such as Jean Canavaggio's work on the Quixotic myth, John J. Allen on the psychological development of Don Quixote, or Martín de Riquer on his parodic nature, to name but a few. As a matter of fact, a “theory of quixotism” has been developed for quite some time now in the field commonly known as Cervantes studies in English and cervantismo in Spanish. What some now call “Quixotic studies” would benefit immensely from the work produced by Cervantes scholars or cervantistas.

In the first chapter following the introduction, Dale's analysis of The Female Quixote proposes to read Arabella as a representation of a book market dominated by visuality. Dale argues that this visuality is “pivotal to Lennox's complex self-positioning as a female author within a literary marketplace pervaded with anxiety about feminized literary production and consumption” (42). In the chapter on Polly Honeycombe, Dale explains how quixotic impressions are presented visually by using the body of the main character to imprint the play itself. That is, the play is imprinted in the body of the eponymous protagonist just as literature is imprinted in quixotic narratives. Lennox's and Coleman's quixotes are female, and Dale ponders the extent to which gender quixotism pervades the masculine Quixote in Tristram Shandy. Dale's thoughtful reading of Sterne's novel reveals that the superficial marginalization of women springs from men's insecurity. Her analysis of The Spiritual Quixote expounds the quixotization of eighteenth-century religious enthusiasm. Similarly, she examines the usage of quixotism deployed to satirize politics in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. In the last chapter, “Conclusion: Quixotic Impressions in the Nineteenth Century,” Dale explains that interest in quixotic reading continued into the nineteenth century when the impressionable reader was “more feminized, more politicized, and more aberrant” (153). The Printed Reader is a brilliant contribution to the study of how eighteenth-century British writers understood Don Quixote and deployed quixotic parody in their works.