Contemporary Quixotes Represented from a British Perspective: The ‘Quixotization’ of the Spanish ‘Other’ in Miranda France's Don Quixote's Delusions, Travels in Castilian Spain

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English literature has a longstanding fascination with Don Quixote. Thomas Shelton, an Irishman partly educated in Salamanca, became in 1612 the first person to assume the daunting task of translating Don Quixote into a foreign language initiating thereby a process of influence and admiration which has lasted for more than three centuries.1 Travel literature has clearly benefited from the spell which Cervantes cast on English letters, as the admiration for Cervantes’s novel would eventually become one of many reasons that drew and still draw British travellers to Spain. The main aim of this paper is to establish the precise connections between literary-mediated travel writing and xenographic representation, by reflecting on the ways in which the fascination with Don Quixote defines the portrait that a contemporary writer, Miranda France, offers of Post-Franco Spain in her travelogue Don Quixote’s Delusions, Travels in Castilian Spain (2001). Cervantes’s Don Quixote, it will be argued, functions in France’s work as a catalyst for the observation of contemporary Spanish society by bringing together xenographic representation and cervantine reflection, and thus situating France within the framework of other English-speaking travel writers who had already framed their portraits of Spain through the lens of Cervantes’s novel. English travel writing in Spain finds its first truly representative examples during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the work of subsequently prominent authors such as William Beckford, Robert Southey or Lord Byron.2 Richard Ford’s A Handbook for Travellers in