Robinson Crusoe

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Robinson Crusoe

• Birth of the Novel

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What is a novel?
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Novel

• Def. (M. H. Abrams) The term novel is now
  applied to a great variety of writings that have
  in common only the attribute of being extended
  works of fiction written in prose. Its
  magnitude permits a greater variety of
  characters, greater complication of plot (or
  plots), ampler development of milieu, and more
  sustained exploration of character and motives
  than do the shorter, more concentrated modes.

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The Reading Public

• Defoe is a literary merchant as much as he is an
  author. He takes advantage of an emerging
  market the reading public. This market is
  created by
• The printing pressenables mass production of
  reading material
• A middle class (middle station) with the
  leisure for reading

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Popular Taste

• The novel was not considered a literary genre
  (type of writing) in the 18th c.
• Defoe was more concerned with pleasing the tastes
  of the public than the taste of the public as
  opposed to the taste of the critics
• He referred to his audience as honest meaning
  ignorant persons

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Language and Popular Taste

• Defoe did not write his first novel, RC, until he
  was 59. Until then he wrote as a journalist and
  political pamphleteer. His style is influenced by
  his journalism. Explain how.
• Other factors that were influencing language at
  the timethe Lockian conception of language the
  Royal Society's wish for a language which would
  help its scientific and technological aims by
  keeping close to the speech of artisans,
  countrymen, and merchants' and to the plain
  unadorned style of later seventeenth-century
  preaching which obtained its effects by
  repetition rather than by imagery or structural
  elaboration.

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Rise of the Novel

• According to the dead literary critic Ian Watt,
  the emergence of the novel as a genre was enabled
  by two factors.
• The reading public (which we have just talked
  about) and
• An individualist society

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Individualism

• Def the conception that all values, rights, and
  duties originate in individuals (as opposed to
  groups or institutions such as the state, church
  or society)
• Consider how the advent individualism might have
  changed British society.

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Causes of Individualist Society

• Ian Wattstill deadattributes two causes to
  individualist society
• Rise of modern industrial capitalism
• Spread of Protestantism

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Rise of Modern Industrial Capitalism

• Specializationbrings about more choice for
  individuals
• Instead of making candles, you can now choose to
  make the wick or the wax
• i.e. there are more jobs but not necessarily more
  exciting jobs
• This is a possible reason that there was an
  appetite for adventure stories like Robinson
  Crusoe

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Rise of Modern Industrial Capitalism, contd

• The pursuit of wealth weakens social ties.
• Can you give some examples of how this is
  exemplified in Robinson Crusoe?

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Rise of Modern Industrial Capitalism, contd
HOMO ECONOMICUS

• Robinson Crusoe is often referred to as an
  exemplar of homo economicus, the economic man.
• Pascal All the unhappiness of man arises from
  one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in
  their own room.
• What do you think about this statement? How do
  you think Crusoe would feel about this statement?

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Rise of Modern Industrial Capitalism, contd

• Individual mobility is increasing figuratively
  (class mobility) and literally. Exploring, trade
  and colonization are creating wealth and helping
  to drive the engine of a new capitalist economy.
• The adventure story is a metaphor for a new
  individualist life which itself is more
  adventurous.
• Or, the ability to read fiction is merely another
  choice. The printing press offers substitute
  experience.

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Spread of Protestantism

• Protestantism emphasizes the idea that
  untiring stewardship of the material gifts of God
  was a paramount religious and ethical
  obligation. Watt
• German sociologist Max Weber traces this idea to
  the concept of a calling. Martin Luther used
  this word (actually the German word Beruf) in his
  translation of the Bible.
• See Robinson Crusoe, p. 14.
• This passage and Luthers bible combine the call
  of God with a worldly calling.
• Therefore, being successful in business has been
  viewed much more positively in the Protestant
  tradition than in Catholicism where holiness is
  found in a monkish separation from the material
  world.

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For next time

• The tension between spiritualism and materialism.

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Francis Bacon

• "Men have sought to make a world from their own
  conception and to draw from their own minds all
  the material which they employed, but if, instead
  of doing so, they had consulted experience and
  observation, they would have the facts and not
  opinions to reason about, and might have
  ultimately arrived at the knowledge of the laws
  which govern the material world."