Genre Reconsidered: Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote

Abstract

Charlotte Lennox was engaged in a kind of generic transformation, or rather confusion, in the mid-eighteenth century literary scene around her. Romance, novel, satire, and history were not clearly differentiated. The newly emerging novel was challenging the once dominant romance genre and subsuming the traditional forms of verse satire. However, the former genres’ influence was so pervasive that writers often could not escape their influence, which made many eighteenth century texts the sites of contrasting literary genres. Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) is a text that captures such mid-century debates between novel as the new genre and romance and satire as older genres. The Female Quixote is Lennox’s comment on the intersection of literary genres and an experiment with the novel as genre for the woman writer at a time when the male practitioners of this new genre dominated the literary scene. Romance and novel are the dominant genres at play in this text, while satire is a weaker “genre” oscillating between these two and distorting their boundaries.