Fiction as wisdom: the moral heritage of the eighteenth-century English novel
Tyler, Paula Eyrich
Tyler, Paula Eyrich
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1986
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Abstract
This study of genuine moral values in the early eighteenth-century novel focuses on the narrative voice in Samuel Richardson's Pamela and in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Although it benefits from work done in the field of genetic explanations, this study focuses on the moral intentions of eighteenth-century literature. It begins with a review of modern critics who have praised Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding for the wisdom of its detached narrator. It then suggests that a similar ethos in Pamela and Robinson Crusoe, drawn from English pragmatic philosophy, has been often overlooked and is conveyed in the characters' attempts to be analytical, self-controlled, and discerning. This close examination for a clear and distinct moral procedure in the judgment-making of Pamela and Robinson Crusoe follows the exact lines of their narratives, searching for ways that Fielding's prominent contemporaries share his traditional Augustan dislike of self-delusion and excessiveness. This examination focuses on the rational and ethical behavior segment by segment in Pamela and Robinson Crusoe rather than on romantic or bourgeois strains. A summary of modern criticism that precedes each textual exposition explores the bases on which modern critics have dismissed the moral voice of these two characters. Subsections of this study break down Pamela's struggle for self-determination into episodic moral triumphs from her first victimization as platitudinal naif, through her rhetorical and logical growth in argument with her seducer, to her often-neglected philosophical reactions to marriage among the gentry. Sub-sections tracing Crusoe's episodic development to a likable man of sense focus on his youthful impulsiveness, his vague notion of adventure, his admiration for the processes of civilization, and his eager participation in community. This study suggests that the analytical habit of criticism transcended its structural and genetic eighteenth-century beginnings to become part of the first-person character narrator in the early English novel. The conclusion argues that Pamela and Crusoe become more pleasing toward the ends of their stories in ways that typify eighteenth-century moral values and that they come by their wisdom through an established route of testing empirical notions. In ideology, the study concludes, Pamela and Robinson Crusoe are the moral guides they purport to be rather than crude precursors of twentieth-century ambivalence.
Contents
Subject
Subject(s)
Defoe, Daniel, 1661?-1731. Robinson Crusoe
Richardson, Samuel, 1689-1761. Pamela
English literature--18th century--History and criticism
Richardson, Samuel, 1689-1761. Pamela
English literature--18th century--History and criticism
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Dissertation
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vi, 238 leaves
Department
English