The aim of this thesis is to understand the presentations of characters¡¦ identity problems in Jonathan Swift¡¦s Gulliver¡¦s Travels and Daniel Defoe¡¦s Robinson Crusoe in relation to their respective genre and to see how the presentations reflect the social ambience and the cultural development in eighteenth-century England. This thesis consists of five chapters. In chapter one, I will briefly summarize the social conditions in eighteenth-century England. This summary of social conditions will show eighteenth-century England as a society of conflicts and contrasts between old and new values. Two key words here, old and new values, will allude to the development of literary genres in eighteenth-century England. Novel is a term which first appears around this time in the history of literary writing and which refers to a new type of genre. As people have varieties of life styles, so do authors have a new genre to work with. However, this newness, either in a social or cultural context, coexists with the old values. In the context of literary writing, the novel, as a genre, has to compete and cooperate with one of its precursors, the genre of satire.
In chapter two, I will try to understand the relationship between novel and satire in the light of another genre, utopia. Even though the utopian element in satire is a counterpoint, meaning the dystopian stance, of utopian traditions, there still is a strong sense of community in satirical writings. Compared with satire, the sense of individuals is the core of the genre of the novel. Realism, marked by Ian Watt, is a new trend in novel writing and it is highly connected with the idea of individualism instead of the sense of community. In order to see this difference, Swift¡¦s Gulliver¡¦s Travels and Defoe¡¦s Robinson Crusoe are the two texts that I will use in chapter three and four for detailed discussions. As for the second part of chapter two, I try to single out the idea of travel with the intention to see its importance in eighteen-century England.
In chapters three and four, my concern turns to characters¡¦ identity problems in the two travel narratives: Gulliver¡¦s Travels and Robinson Crusoe. Compared with each other, the characters of the two travel narratives have different identity problems and this difference is important in the way of symbolizing the different concerns of each genre: satire for a sense of community and novel for individualism. Moreover, in terms of the different endings in the two travel narratives, Gulliver and Crusoe¡¦s experiences of their identity problems also suggest an important social condition, which is the different possibilities of life, in eighteenth-century England. In conclusion, I will give an overall review of the whole thesis.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0620105-143337 |
| Date | 20 June 2005 |
| Creators | Chueh, Di-feng |
| Contributors | Kuo-jung Chen, Rudolphus Teeuwen, Ting-yao Luo |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0620105-143337 |
| Rights | unrestricted, Copyright information available at source archive |
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