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Defoe’s Subversion and Containment of the Dominant Discourse in a Journal of the Plague Year

Author: WangXiaoQing
Tutor: ChenBing
School: Anhui University
Course: English Language and Literature
Keywords: Enlightenment rationalism Subversion Suppression Of free
CLC:
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2010
Downloads: 80
Quote: 1
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Abstract

Daniel Defoe 17-18 century British renowned radical politician and novelist. The 1722 novel \This novel with Defoe the other preach text complement each other and vessel isolation the 1721 Government isolation Act held with the medical measures the obviously supportive attitude. Based on Daniel Defoe accurate and realistic narrative fiction reflected a range of issues, such as the basic responsibilities of the political, the impotence of human nature, and the irreconcilable contradictions of human reason and emotion are inconsistent so far and thought-provoking . Defoe witnessed the historic moment of this religious obsession concessions to scientific rationality. However, in the the thesis material collected stage, I found fewer domestic Plague Years on, the few literary commentary not yet touched the fiction of rational mainstream. This article aims to look for this final decision Defoe free of potential ideological forces, combined with Freud's research methods of behavioral psychology and Greenblatt's New Historicism angle, to conduct in-depth research. Defoe is first, with troubled Narrator fled and left behind the rational mainstream discourse. The 18th-century Enlightenment rationalism as a special historical period of cultural backgrounds. During that period, most rationalists by Newton and Locke, highly recommended by empirical observation methods and scientific questioning attitude, instead of the traditional religious obsession Defoe shaping the narrator is no exception. Defoe subvert rational mainstream discourse proceed from the confusion description of the City of London. Ruthless and cruel God, irrational City, China, freedom of the individual is limited, all reflect a disordered state at the time. Plague in the United Kingdom, is no longer the perfect embodiment of the orderly rational country, more than idealism. City of London be re-interpreted as an the utter disorder irrational synonymous. However, the new historicism angle analysis Defoe subversion of rationality is controlled within a certain range. Instrumental rationality, utilitarian rational and new Christian reinvention Defoe suppression of subversion, Defoe rationalism itself tangled. HF narrator himself with the behavioral characteristics of the rationalists. He drifted away from the streets of plague infection, make every effort to explain the plague, from a scientific point of view, and an extremely complex state of mind to question God's rationality. In addition, tried to portray the hero in the novel to a certain extent inhibit the spread of the plague, but greatly reduced in its struggle motivation. Defoe just to earn money and food in order to survive and not enough on the true sense of the heroic act. Defoe and the \Until last novel, \Second, analysis or from the free thinking of the narrator in the novel of faith contradiction and design to the center of the two-pronged approach. Religion, natural science, and experience in philosophy, such faith in a very long time, most of the philosophers and scientists of Defoe and even its contemporaries deep impact. In fact, the ambivalence of the religious obligations and scientific value flooded the whole plague period, this idea of ??free time is a fairly common phenomenon. Foucault is more conducive to the center of the theory from the point of view of the text, the text among the hidden meaning of the excavation. Defoe subversion of mainstream discourse in the novel and did not touch on the deep structure, also can not shake the foundation of rational order. Despite this religious obsession with science and rationality between seemingly irreconcilable contradictions, identified the real reason for of Defoe thinking free of the narrator eventually realized humanism reinvention, to become a \\

Defoe’s Subversion and Containment of the Dominant Discourse in a Journal of the Plague Year

Abstract

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