Robinson Crusoe as Defoe's Theory of Fiction (original) (raw)
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Modern Philology, 2016
This volume brings together eleven essays on Robinson Crusoe published by Maximillian E. Novak in journals and colloquia between 1996 and 2012. Each essay explores a different way of raising the vexed question of the nature of Defoe's "realism"-the distinguishing quality of his fiction that many readers have experienced, but few can convincingly define. In an introductory essay that provides a retrospective of his career, Novak recalls his arrival at Oxford in the mid-1950s to begin his graduate studies. He was drawn to work on Defoe in two ways: he wanted to understand "Defoe's world and the ways in which he saw the problems of his time" and also "the methods by which Defoe succeeded in creating a sense of the real" (2). The first of these interests led to Novak's groundbreaking works of historical criticism, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (1962) and Defoe and the Nature of Man (1963); the second led to Realism, Myth and History in Defoe's Fiction (1983) and to the essays in the volume under review. For Novak, each of these questions is answered in terms of the other: that is, what is real about Defoe's fiction is that it is set firmly in a historical context, while the historicity is subordinated to an enlivening personal consciousness. Defoe's fictional histories use "a variety of devices for evoking the real through awakening the imagination of the reader, asking him/her to see what was not fully in the text" (5). It is the variety of Defoe's devices for stimulating the reader's imagination that Novak explores through these essays. One device that Defoe adapted from the visual arts is the representation of ordinary objects and persons in paintings. In an early essay on the novel, Sir Walter Scott noted the influence on Defoe of the Dutch and Flemish realist painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who represented
Survival Made Him the Fittest: The Ideological Evolution of Defoe's Robinson
Crusoe While heralded by many as the first novel of the English language, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe also warrants praise as a novel in which the evolution of the protagonist shapes the entire story. Unwilling to allow his Crusoe to travel from cover to cover statically immutable, Defoe instead presents a character whose initially fear-filled, fatalistic colonialism gives way to a Christian understanding of providential kindness. Beyond the surface-level narrative of a castaway merely seeking survival, Robinson Crusoe is a story of a man working to learn how to live in both his immediate environment and that which lies beyond what he can physically see. Although the ethos of the protagonist, and the novel as a whole, is still significantly encumbered by imperialistic tendencies, Defoe's narrative unfolds his Crusoe's transformation into a relatively sympathetic representation of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Christian faith and a drastically different protagonist than the one who opened the novel. Critics of the Protestant view of providence often equate that doctrine with the broader idea of fatalism. While surface level similarities certainly exist and many who claim a belief in providence often express it in attitude and terminology more akin to a belief in Fate, the two ideas are distinct and in many ways contradictory. Far from being the result of an impersonal force, the Protestant view of providence argues that a personal deity exists in sovereign control of every second of every day and of every atom of every molecule. How this is manifest in the ebb and flow of everyday life is debated, but the personal nature of providence distinguishes it from fate. Robinson
مجلة رسالة المشرق- المجلد 36، العدد 4 - الرقم المسلسل للعدد 4 الصفحة 581-625, 2021
This study inspects the true religious background of Daniel Defoe in disguise behind his most celebrated character Robinson Crusoe. It specifically detects the alternative potentiality of being a crypto-Jew or a rather Puritan Judaizer. Throughout making an in-depth analysis of Defoe's literary work, principally his renowned novel Robinson Crusoe with its subtle biblical allusions, and having Danial Defoe's religious nonconformist practices simultaneously compared, the study has suggested a more likely connection to crypto-Judaism or Judaizing, rather than a falsified, pretended Christianity. This academic paper scrutinizes Defoe's portrayal of Robinson Crusoe's regular observance of sabbath, his exact references to biblical الم رسالة المشرق رسالة
International Journal of English and Studies, 2021
Although New-Historicism and Reader-response literary theories suggest different attempts in the generation of meaning, in fact, they exist in separate domains. However, the connection between them is a matter of the existence of a text. Without doubt, on the most basic and cursory level, New Historicism is aimed at decoding the manner and culture prevalent in a particular time of history as encoded in the text while Reader-response firmly comes from the strength that a work of art cannot generate meaning for itself without the reader. From this measure of understanding, the clarity in the amalgamation possibility becomes clear. In Robinson Crusoe (1719) analysis here, the intention is to identify the meaning of realism construction the researcher gives to it but within the historical context of the 18th century English novel. On this significant scope the twin theories of New-Historicism and Reader-response become unavoidable tools in the research investigation.
The Imaginative Conservative, 2020
The essay is a discussion of Defoe’s novel as an oscillation between a search for a Divine providential meaning in the plights of existence and a more secular interpretation of phenomena. The essay shows how Crusoe as narrator tries to reflect back on his journey as a sort of spiritual self-discovery; however, his own actions and deepest passions (in the form of his naturalistic interpretation of events on the island as well as his excessive attachment to wealth) undermine this spiritual orientation. This oscillation between the explanatory frameworks offered by Christianity and secular modernity, I assert, make the novel still relevant and powerful for us today.