3.

The Traveler in Eighteen Century Literature (illustrate with two texts) Swift and Defoe (Robinson Crusoe / Gulliver) module III During the 18th Century privileged young Englishmen often filled their time between a university education and the beginning of a career with an extended tour of continental Europe. The Grand Tour is in essence a British invention because by the 18th Century Britain was the wealthiest nation in the world and had a large upper class with both the time and the money to travel. Two classics of world literature Robinson Crusoe wrote by Daniel Defoe and Gullivers Travels wrote by Jonathan Swift have important places in the history of English novel. Swift had been Daniel Defoes main competitor in the field of journalism for twenty years, and it is obvious from Gullivers Travels that he had been influenced by Defoe, both in the adoption of fiction as a vehicle for his purpose, and in the use of a plausible, matter-of-fact realism. Robinson Crusoe, desperately lonely on his desert island, is the first significant example in English literature of the prudential hero: he took some coins on the wreck, even though he knows they will be of no use to him. Crusoe represents exactly the kind of attitudes which were eventually to make Britain the richest country in the world and lead her to establish a vast overseas empire. Crusoe, like Defoe himself, was so thoroughly the embodiment of the social and economic drives of the early eighteenth century. The concentration on the practical and the rational left little room for any real exploration of character. There is not any exploration of personal relationships: Crusoes attitude towards marriage is the reverse of romantic - in his typically practical view it was neither to my advantage or dissatisfaction, but nothing more. He uses more the practical sight than his feelings when he should deal with most of situations and also he shows inability of acknowledge everything different from himself. Swift uses Gullivers Travels to describe human nature and society of that period Robinson Crusoe may bear a superficial resemblance to these travel books but its spell goes far deeper. It holds an appeal to the pioneering instinct deep in human nature that seeks to pit itself, alone, against the unknown. Crusoe is a continuous prose narrative written with no other specific object than to create the illusion of day-to-day living.

Gullivers Travels is a work of fantasy lulled in the course of the first few pages into a mood of complete confidence, security and credulity. Gulliver finds himself, after a long sleep of exhaustion, the prisoner of tiny human beings who have fastened him securely to the ground. The brilliant precision of the language and imagery constitute a large part of the narrative spell. Gulliver (the paradigmatic traveller) wakes up amnesic and does not try to remember any of the absurdities of English society that he recognises and scorns at the peoples he meets, positioning himself from various perspectives (that of a giant, that of a dwarf, that of a fool, that of an ingenious man, etc). Swifts purpose in writing Gullivers Travels was satirical and reformative, adopting new fictional techniques and producing as a consequence the prototype of the fable type of novel. Not only Robinson Crusoe but also Gullivers Travels describe facts, human condition in a very realistic way (verisimilitude). Both works are read as a juvenile classic as there are shortened editions unaware that Gullivers Travels, for example is one of the most devastating and painful satires in literature. Different from Crusoe, Gulliver changes and develops from the cocksure eighteenth-century European convinced of the superiority of his own age and culture to the shocked, sobered and disillusioned misanthrope. To sum up it is important to highlight that Defoe was the first to take it for granted that the storytellers task was to achieve as far as possible the verisimilitude of real life. In addition, in his innovatory use of the form of an autobiographical memoir, he was the first to achieve something approaching real pattern and unity.