Pardo García, Pedro Javier
“Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker and the Cervantine Tradition in Eighteenth-Century England”. In: Cervantes in the English Speaking World. (Estudios de literatura 96) Kassel 2005, pp. 81-106.

Traditional accounts of Cervantes’ influence on Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) have focused on Launcelot Greaves to the detriment of the rest of his novels, particularly of Humphry Clinker. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that this work is not only the summit of Smollett’s career, but also of his emulation of Cervantes and of the Cervantine tradition in eighteenth-century English fiction. Humphry Clinker provides a summa not only of different forms of quixotism explored in previous eighteenth-century novels, but also of different aspects of the quixotic principle, that is, of the theory and practice of fiction implicit in Don Quixote, developed by Fielding and Sterne beyond Cervantes. The paper first deals with the three quixotic figures of the novel (Lismahago, Bramble and Clinker), then moves on to the Cervantine juxtaposition of romance and realism sometimes referred to as comic romance and finally discusses the Cervantine features of the dialogical interplay of consciousnesses.