SOURCE: Miecznikowski, Cynthia J. “The Parodic Mode and the Patriarchal Imperative: Reading the Female Reader(s) in Tabitha Tenney's Female Quixotism.” Early American Literature 24, no. 1 (1990): 34-45.

In the following essay, Miecznikowski considers the parodic functions of Female Quixotism in relation to the eighteenth-century sentimental novel and Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote.

Tabitha Gilman Tenney's novel Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon, first published anonymously in 1801 and widely reprinted thereafter, is underestimated by twentieth-century scholars of early American literature.¹ Only two recent studies offer readings of the novel—one as social satire, the other as collusive criticism of the novel as genre.² While both of these readings of the novel are useful for their study of its extratextual implications, neither addresses the ways in which the text's radical and conservative tendencies interplay within the text itself; that is, neither interpretation accounts for...