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My thesis engages with reader-response theory in order to show how the realisations it makes might be refined by deconstruction. Reader-response theorists such as Stanley Fish and Norman Holland acknowledge that a subjective element inheres within all interpretation. This has an unsettling effect for literary criticism, which traditionally grounds its claims on notions of objectivity. Criticism must be rethought; both Fish and Holland promise to practise a self-conscious literary criticism which represents more accurately the experience of reading. My thesis begins with an analysis of reader-response which demonstrates, however, that its attempt to inscribe the act of reading fails; it takes place within a text which is read. Reading inevitably recedes. Neither Fish nor Holland explicitly addresses this dilemma. Deconstruction, on the other hand, takes it into account; it works with, not in spite of, it in order to show that self-consciousness must be approached in a certain way if it is to remain useful. My thesis does not therefore offer a new theory of reader-response but rethinks this phase within the history of theory by responding to the challenge presented by a recent self-consciousness in theory and literature alike. I show that it is possible, in reading works of contemporary fiction alongside texts by Derrida (and those who think after him), to deepen our understanding of what it is to read. Reading cannot be grasped; it is marked by that which cannot be known. Its drama resounds with the recent shift towards a notion of ethics predicated upon the unknowability of the other. My thesis wonders repeatedly what consequences this appearance of the unknowable has for literary criticism; to acknowledge its centrality is to accept that the role of criticism cannot be to fully capture the text. Instead, the readings I offer remain attentive, in the face of their failure, to the irrecoverable.

Scholars have long since identified a quixotic mode in fiction, acknowledging the widespread influence of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605-15) on subsequent texts. In most cases, “quixotic” signifies a preponderance of allusions to Don Quixote in a given text, such that most studies of “quixotic fictions” or “quixotic influence” are primarily taxonomic in purpose and in outcome: they name and catalogue a text or group of texts as “quixotic,” then argue that, by virtue of the vast and protean influence of Don Quixote, the quixotic mode in fiction is always divided, lacking any semblance of ideological consistency. I argue, however, that the very characteristics of Don Quixote that make him such an attractive literary model for such a broad range of narratives—his bookish idealism, his fixation on the upper-classed grandiosity of the lives of noble knights—also form the consistent, ideological groundwork of quixotism: the exceptionalist substitution of fictive idealism for material reality. By tracing the ways in which quixotes become mouthpieces for various exceptionalist arguments in eighteenth-century British and American texts, like Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742), Tobias Smollett's Launcelot Greaves (1760), Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752), Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry (1792-1815), and Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive (1797), among others, I demonstrate the link between quixotism and exceptionalism, or between fictive idealism and the belief that one (or one's worldview) is an exception to the scrutiny of the surrounding world.

This thesis considers the presence of the epistolary tradition of female complaint in the writings of five late eighteenth-century women writers: Hester Thrale Piozzi, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Turner Smith, Mary Robinson, and Frances Burney D’Arblay. The epistolary female complaint tradition is premised on the suggestion that readers are permitted, through the literary endeavours of male authors/transcribers, a glimpse into the authentically felt woes of women; the writers in this study both question and exploit this expectation. Often viewed by critics like John Kerrigan as a tradition that stifled female creativity, epistolary female complaint proves, this thesis argues, a lively and enlivening tradition for women writers; it provided opportunities for literary experimentation and enabled them to turn their experiences into artistic form. Five themes central to the epistolary female complaint tradition are considered: betrayal, absence, suicide, falls, and authorship. Each chapter looks at one theme and one author specifically. Chapter 1 examines the narrative of betrayal Hester Thrale Piozzi established in her journals from 1764 to 1784. Chapter 2 turns to Mary Wollstonecraft and her accounts of absence in her private letters to Gilbert Imlay, and her epistolary travel account, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). Chapter 3 discusses Charlotte Turner Smith’s engagement with the theme of suicide in her Elegiac Sonnets (1784) and her epistolary novel, Desmond(1792). Chapter 4 considers the strategies employed in Mary Robinson’s autobiographical, poetic, and fictional writings, which work to move beyond the moral fall the tradition implied. Chapter 5 focuses on the recurrent theme of authorial debt in Frances Burney D’Arblay’s journals, plays, and fiction. I conclude by considering Jane Austen’s appropriation of the tradition in her final novel, Persuasion (1818), and her transformation of the tradition by providing a resolution to the cause of complaint.