In the opening pages of his new contribution to the reception of Cervantes's Don Quixote in Anglophone literatures, A World of Disorderly Notions: Quixote and the Logic of Exceptionalism, Aaron Hanlon notes that Quixotic has become “a generic term” (5) and that previous research on this topic has left “the impression that quixotism is without intellectual consistency, destined for eternity to confuse and mislead” (5). In his view, because the characters regarded as Quixotes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British and American literatures “are political” (6), Quixotic should also be regarded as “a starkly political term” (7). Hanlon's view fully concurs with previous research on English Quixotes with political bias such as Samuel Butler's Hudibras, Joseph Fielding's stage version of the Don, and a host of others in the so-called English Quixotic fictions. Hanlon justifies his political construction of Cervantes's character also, noting that “At its most basic level . . . Don Quixote is a . . . commentary on Spanish imperial pursuits” (22). Certainly, while Don Quixote is many things—mostly a critical metacommentary of literary theory conceived by Cervantes as a work in a series culminating in Persiles—Hanlon rightly underscores its potential for political satire that indeed prompted a string of critical essays in the early twentieth century, such as those by Ramiro de Maeztu and Américo Castro.

Hanlon contends that the political reincarnations of Cervantes's hero in the British and American literatures of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries find the logic of Quixotism in exceptionalism. In his words, “[m]ore than belligerence or knighthood, conservatism or radicalism, the experience of exceptionalism is what seventeenth- and eighteenth-century translators and authors consistently picked up in Don Quixote and reproduced in their quixotic characters” (9). In the book's central section, Hanlon deploys this idea of exceptionalism, analyzing nine literary British and American works and, in the process offering the following forms of Quixotic exceptionalism: “English exceptionalism” in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), “American exceptionalism” in Royall Tyler's Algerine Captive (1797), “civil exceptionalism” in Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742) and H. H. Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry (1792), “domestic exceptionalism” in Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote (1752) and T. G. Tenney's Female Quixotism (1801), “juridical exceptionalism” in Tobias Smollett's Launcelot Greaves (1760), “reactionary exceptionalism” in Washington Irving's History of New York (1809), and “radical exceptionalism” in Charles Lucas's Infernal Quixote (1801). Hanlon's analysis foregrounds the logic of exceptionalism as a consistent feature of these Quixotic character and also reveals the extent to which their authors understood the political potential of Cervantes's character.

A World of Disorderly Notions doubtless is a readable addition to Cervantes studies insomuch as it expands our understanding of Don Quixote's impact on world literature. Hanlon's is not entirely mistaken when he asserts that “the concept of the quixotic has reached . . . a critical mass of meaning, resulting too often in confusion rather than clarification” (181) leading, in his words, to a “crisis of meaning” (4). A similar phenomenon was highlighted by Alexander Parker some fifty years ago, when he noted that studies of the European picaresque often failed to account for the research published outside their subject area (Literature and the Delinquent. The Picaresque Novel in Spain and Europe, 1599–1753 [1967]). This point has been repeated by others, such as Jerry Beasley, who have stressed that comparatists need to consider the research published in all languages and not only in English. Indeed, after decades and centuries of Cervantes studies, we can hardly refer to the study of “Quixotism” as a field suffering from a “crisis of meaning” (11). Hanlon indicates that “[t]he impetus of [his] study was the recognition that prior studies of quixotism have been unable to find intellectual consistency among so many quixotic figures in fiction of the long eighteenth century and beyond” (181). One could adroitly observe that previous research has indeed expounded an “intellectual consistency” in Cervantes's character and in its Quixotic descendants, not only in the aforementioned studies by the likes of Maeztu and Castro, but also in recent research into Quixotism in world literature such as Jean Canavaggio and others.

A World of Disorderly Notions advances knowledge of the imitations of Don Quixote generally known as Quixotic fictions. While the logic of some of these Quixotic characters and others had been richly described and analyzed by previous research, Hanlon's contribution to our understanding of how Don Quixote was read and imitated in Britain and the United States provides further insight into this subject. As some British authors, such as Tobias Smollett, noted before the German Romanticists, Cervantes's hero represents the highest moral values of a bygone age. It is safe to say now that the Quixotic exceptionalism studied by Hanlon seems to spring from that noble morality of chivalry acted out in an unheroic era. A World of Disorderly Notions shows how this peculiarity runs through some of those Quixotic fictions. This is, in sum, an interesting contribution to the subject of Cervantes's international reception.