Voices of the Self in Daniel Defoe's Fiction

Voices of the Self in Daniel Defoe's Fiction PDF Author: Zaixin Zhang
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
The alternative Marxist approach to literary criticism in the present study consists of three «vocal» modes of interpretation: the public voice, the private voice, and the homeless voice of the self. The public voice represents the authorial vision shaped by dominant ideology that covers up the «objective» real, while the private voice corresponds to the authorial conscious or unconscious insertion into radical ideology that turns the «objective» real into the ideological real. However, the homeless voice of the self may obliterate any ties with history and ideology. A representation of the Marxist «particular interest» of the self, the homeless voice echoes in the open space of the text and reaches for the distant real shaped by the reader's interpretive paradigms inside or outside the constraints of the institutional discourse. The alternative Marxist approach values both history and theory in literary criticism, as the interplay between the two may reinforce and supplement each other in their shared interpretive territory of the private voice of the self in the text, although the public voice is more oriented towards history and the homeless voice towards theory. The different voices of the self are exemplified in a critical reading of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders, and Roxana. Such a study profits from both modern critical theory (reader response, postmodernism, and feminist theory, etc.) and historical insights into Defoe's fiction (religious hermeneutics, theology and medicine, and gender issues in the eighteenth century, etc.)

Voices of the Self in Daniel Defoe's Fiction

Voices of the Self in Daniel Defoe's Fiction PDF Author: Zaixin Zhang
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Get Book Here

Book Description
The alternative Marxist approach to literary criticism in the present study consists of three «vocal» modes of interpretation: the public voice, the private voice, and the homeless voice of the self. The public voice represents the authorial vision shaped by dominant ideology that covers up the «objective» real, while the private voice corresponds to the authorial conscious or unconscious insertion into radical ideology that turns the «objective» real into the ideological real. However, the homeless voice of the self may obliterate any ties with history and ideology. A representation of the Marxist «particular interest» of the self, the homeless voice echoes in the open space of the text and reaches for the distant real shaped by the reader's interpretive paradigms inside or outside the constraints of the institutional discourse. The alternative Marxist approach values both history and theory in literary criticism, as the interplay between the two may reinforce and supplement each other in their shared interpretive territory of the private voice of the self in the text, although the public voice is more oriented towards history and the homeless voice towards theory. The different voices of the self are exemplified in a critical reading of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders, and Roxana. Such a study profits from both modern critical theory (reader response, postmodernism, and feminist theory, etc.) and historical insights into Defoe's fiction (religious hermeneutics, theology and medicine, and gender issues in the eighteenth century, etc.)

Defoe’s Major Fiction

Defoe’s Major Fiction PDF Author: Elizabeth R. Napier
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611496144
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
This book focuses on the pervasive concern with narrativity and self-construction that marks Defoe’s first-person fictional narratives. Defoe’s fictions focus obsessively and elaborately on the act of storytelling—not only in his creation of idiosyncratic voices preoccupied with the telling (and often the concealing) of their own life stories but also in his narrators’ repeated adversion to other, untold stories that compete for attention with their own. Defoe’s narratives raise profound questions about selfhood and agency (as well as demonstrate competing attitudes about narration) in his fictive worlds. His canon exhibits a broad range of first-person fictional accounts, from pseudo-memoir (A Journal of the Plague Year, Memoirs of a Cavalier) to criminal autobiography (Moll Flanders) to confession (Roxana), and the narrators of these accounts (secretive, compulsive, fractive) exhibit an array of resistances to the telling of their life stories. Such experiments with narration evince Defoe’s deep involvement in projects of self-description and -delineation, as he interrogates the boundaries of the self and dramatizes the arduousness of self-accounting. Defoe’s fictions are emphatically consciousness-centered and the significance of such a focus to the development of the novel is patently as great as is his “realistic” style. Defoe’s narrative project, in fact, challenges current views on the moment at which inwardness and interiority begin, as Lukács argued, to comprise the subject matter of the novel, implicitly attributing to identity and consciousness a place of signal and complex importance in the new genre.

Rethinking Postmodern Subjectivity

Rethinking Postmodern Subjectivity PDF Author: Zuzanna Ladyga
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783631591093
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
What is postmodern literary subjectivity? How to talk about it without falling in the trap of negative hyper-essentialism or being seduced by exuberant lit speak? One way out of this dilemma, as this book suggests, is via a redefinition of the concept in the context of Emmanuel Levinas and his radical ethics. By defining subjectivity as an ethically charged act of language, Levinas provides a fresh perspective on the often trivialized aspects of postmodern poetics such as referentiality and affect construction strategies. The foregrounding of the ethical dimension of those poetic elements has far-reaching consequences for how we read postmodern texts and understand postmodernism in general. Thus, to prove the benefits of the Levinasian approach, the author applies it to the work of the canonical American postmodernist, Donald Barthelme, and explains the distinctly ethical character of his apparently surfictional experiments.

Daniel Defoe's Many Voices

Daniel Defoe's Many Voices PDF Author: Eustace Anthony James
Publisher: Amsterdam, [Keizersgracht 302-304] : Rodopi
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description


Daniel Defoe and the Representation of Personal Identity

Daniel Defoe and the Representation of Personal Identity PDF Author: Christopher Borsing
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317247620
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
The concept of a personal identity was a contentious issue in the early eighteenth century. John Locke’s philosophical discussion of personal identity in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding fostered a public debate upon the status of an immortal Christian soul. This book argues that Defoe, like many of this age, had religious difficulties with Locke’s empiricist analysis of human identity. In particular, it examines how Defoe explores competitive individualism as a social threat while also demonstrating the literary and psychological fiction of any concept of a separated, lone identity. This foreshadows Michel Foucault’s assertion that the idea of man is ‘a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge’. The monograph’s engagement with Defoe’s destabilization of any definition or image of personal identity across a wide range of genres – including satire, political propaganda, history, conduct literature, travel narrative, spiritual autobiography, piracy and history, economic and scientific literature, rogue biography, scandalous and secret history, dystopian documentary, science fiction and apparition narrative - is an important and original contribution to the literary and cultural understanding of the early eighteenth century as it interrogates and challenges modern presumptions of individual identity.

Otherness in the Novels of Patrick White

Otherness in the Novels of Patrick White PDF Author: Alma Budurlean
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783631589090
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
The central argument of the thesis, the representation and reception of otherness, is followed throughout White's novels with the support of a complex critical instrumentarium made up of postcolonial theory, reader response theory, cultural-critical frameworks, alterity theory, and narratology. Otherness in its manifold representations is a main component of Patrick White's fiction. It functions on several levels and this requires a deeper entanglement on the part of the reader. The different levels previously referred to are embodied in the various Others who people White's novels: ethnic Others as members of the Australian multicultural society and the Aborigines as colonial Others, as well as gender Others, who also play an important role in White's fictional world. Reading Patrick White is an exercise in tolerance, endurance and acceptance of alternatives. But the efforts of the reader do not remain unrewarded. In his endeavour to change what it meant to imagine Australia, the writer broke down the barriers of what it meant to imagine otherness.

Robinson Crusoe Readalong

Robinson Crusoe Readalong PDF Author: Daniel Defoe
Publisher: Ags Pub
ISBN: 9780785407706
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description


Constructions of Masculinity in British Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present

Constructions of Masculinity in British Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present PDF Author: S. Horlacher
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113701587X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
An in-depth analysis into the construction of male identity as well as a unique and comprehensive historical overview of how masculinity has been constructed in British literature from the Middle Ages to the present. This book is an important contribution to the emerging field of masculinity studies.

The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe

The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe PDF Author: John Richetti
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139827758
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Daniel Defoe had an eventful and adventurous life as a merchant, politician, spy and literary hack. He is one of the eighteenth century's most lively, innovative and important authors, famous not only for his novels, including Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana, but for his extensive work in journalism, political polemic and conduct guides, and for his pioneering 'Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain'. This volume surveys the wide range of Defoe's fiction and non-fiction, and assesses his importance as writer and thinker. Leading scholars discuss key issues in Defoe's novels, and show how the man who was once pilloried for his writings emerges now as a key figure in the literature and culture of the early eighteenth century.

Cross-Gendered Literary Voices

Cross-Gendered Literary Voices PDF Author: R. Kim
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113702075X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
This book investigates male writers' use of female voices and female writers' use of male voices in literature and theatre from the 1850s to the present, examining where, how and why such gendered crossings occur and what connections may be found between these crossings and specific psychological, social, historical and political contexts.