Strange Surprizing Adventures Research Articles

Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade Across Languages, Cultures, and Media ed. by Jakub Lipski, and: Robinson Crusoe after 300 Years ed. by Andreas K. E. Mueller and Glynis Ridley

Reviewed by: Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade Across Languages, Cultures, and Media ed. by Jakub Lipski, and: Robinson Crusoe after 300 Years ed. by Andreas K. E. Mueller and Glynis Ridley Andrew O'Malley Jakub Lipski, ed., Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade Across Languages, Cultures, and Media (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 212. $34.95 paper, $120.00 cloth. Andreas K. E. Mueller and Glynis Ridley, eds., Robinson Crusoe after 300 Years (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press) 2021. Pp. 234; 22 b/w and 7 color illus. $42.50 paper, $150.00 cloth. The 2019 tricentenary of the publication of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (and of its sequel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe) has understandably seen renewed interest in Defoe's most famous literary creation. As has often been noted, it is hard to overstate the extent of Robinson Crusoe's cultural impact; so embedded in the popular psyche are aspects of the story that the image of a person on a desert island, or of a footprint in the sand, universally evokes it. Two recent volumes of essays from Bucknell University Press offer convincing reminders of Crusoe's remarkable, transmedial legacy and continued cultural relevance. Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade Across Languages, Cultures, and Media, edited by Jakub Lipski, concerns itself primarily, as the title suggests, with the protean genre to which Defoe's novel quickly gave rise: "Our main concern here then is studying the Robinsonade as a genre in a constant state of becoming, transcending, as it were, any formal restrictions one might impose on it" (1). Examples of this genre began appearing within a few years of Robinson Crusoe's initial publication; the term itself was coined by the German author, Johann Gottfried Schnabel, to describe his own island shipwreck narrative, Die Insel Felsenburg (1731). Since that time, the island castaway narrative has been adapted to virtually every imaginable category of reader, and has migrated across an incredibly wide range of media: theatrical productions, film, comic books, toys, games, and innumerable commercial enterprises and consumer goods. The collection's first of [End Page 313] four sections, "Exploring and Transcending the Genre," appropriately offers two very strong essays that bookend the literary Robinsonade's history to date. Rivka Swenson's chapter looks back to one of the earliest and most successful examples of the genre, Peter Longueville's The Hermit (1727), and is followed by Patrick Gill's study of recent postmodern examples. Swenson's revisiting of Longueville's entertaining, imaginative but understudied novel persuasively considers its repeatedly referenced eating, food preparation, and pickling—"the act of preserving and transforming" (12)—as a metaphor for narrative world-building practices in the period's fiction. Noting insightfully that Robinson Crusoe serves as "the perfect sandbox setting" (24), offering endless narrative possibilities, Gill's study considers the original novel with Muriel Spark's Robinson (1958), J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986), and Yann Martel's Life of Pi (2001) using the philosophical thought experiment of the "counterfactual" to explore the poetics of the genre. Chapters in the second section, "National Contexts," turn to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century expansion of the Robinsonade into other European national literatures. Przemysław Uściński, in his nuanced study of The Female American (1767), attempts to complicate the colonial legacy of the Robinsonade by invoking Homi Bhabha's idea of a "third space" that troubles "the fixity of any cultural identity" (50). Employing, unusually for an eighteenth-century Robinsonade, a "biracial female missionary as proxy for colonialist power," The Female American raises but ultimately sidesteps "historically urgent questions about justice, agency, and accountability" (50). Editor Jakub Lipski provides a fascinating account of Robinson Crusoe's reception and its role in the rise to prominence of the novel in the literary culture of eighteenth-century Poland. While I was aware that Robinson Crusoe was translated fairly quickly into many European languages (and eventually into virtually every written language, even Esperanto), Lipski's intriguing history of how both its Polish translation and Ignacy Krasicki's Defoeinspired The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom helped change national literary tastes was a revelation to me. The remaining two chapters...

The image of Robinson Crusoe in the aspect of the problem of “one’s own — alien”

One of the topical problems of modern literary criticism is the study of dichotomy “one’s own — alien”. This dichotomy is a representation of a different culture, language and mentality of one people in the literature of another people. The article analyzes the evolution of the Robinson Crusoe’s image in the Russian worldview within the framework of the imagological problem. The novel “The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe” by the English writer Daniel Defoe belongs to the most widely read works of world literature. Interest in it does not fade, both from readers and from experts in various subject areas. Despite the formal simplicity of this text’s architectonics, Defoe’s novel discovered a new artistic paradigm. The Robinson story has long gone beyond the boundaries of the adventure genre. The number of questions about survival, exploitation of resources, social and political interaction with other human communities does not decrease, and the search for answers is becoming global and broad. Various authors around the world view these issues through the lens of Defoe’s novel and his hero. Using the method of imagological analysis proposed by modern scholars (A.A.Kozlova, L.P.Ivanova, etc.), the author analyzes the process of perceiving Robinson Crusoe’s image in Russia in 18th–21st centuries, and demonstrates that in the 18th century, when Defoe’s novel was translated into Russian, Robinson was an “alien” name. Then this proper name became nationally precedent and formed as a concept of linguistic consciousness and culture. The author explores the factors that influenced the development of Robinson’s image, through which it became “one’s own” in Russian culture. Among other factors, there are the creation and development of universal image indicators in a concentrated form (symbolization), embodiment in other forms of art (semiotization), the development of additional prototype consciousness (connotonimization), integration into the system of heroes of Russian writers (interpolation).

Crusoe’s Crusade: Defoe, Genocide, and Imperialism

Cet article revient sur l’appel fait par Robinson Crusoé à tous les chrétiens, dans Serious Reflections , de lancer une croisade contre païens et musulmans — croisade à la fois évangélique et militaire, visant à convertir tous les volontaires à la foi chrétienne, et à éliminer les païens récalcitrants. Comme le montrent les deux premiers volumes de ses aventures, Crusoé (et avec lui Defoe) ne doutait pas de pouvoir convertir les habitants des Amériques et de l’Afrique sub-saharienne, mais l’Asie et l’Afrique du nord lui paraissaient cause perdue. Defoe croyait-il réellement à cette proposition qu’il fait énoncer à Crusoé, incarnation de l’esprit rationnel et pragmatique de l’Angleterre protestante ? L’écrivain tolérant qu’était Defoe cherchait-il à dénoncer le fanatisme affleurant sous les sages méditations spirituelles de Crusoé et sous ses positions coloniales supposément « bienveillantes » ? En s’appuyant sur l’ouvrage de Claude Rawson sur les contradictions de la rhétorique génocidaire de la première modernité, et en prenant en compte les changements d’attitude face à la notion de guerre sainte (y compris dans les écrits de Defoe lui-même sur la violence coloniale), cet article montre que la croisade proposée par Defoe peut s’interpréter comme réel effort de sa part pour saisir les problèmes religieux dans le monde. La proposition génocidaire de Crusoé révèle la peur profonde de Defoe de voir la chrétienté menacée ; mais son expression sous forme d’un récit de fiction indique aussi les réticences de l’auteur quant à la mise en pratique d’un tel plan.

Surprise: The Poetics of the Unexpected from Milton to Austen. Christopher R. Miller. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015. Pp. vii+269.

<i>Surprise: The Poetics of the Unexpected from Milton to Austen</i>. Christopher R. Miller. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015. Pp. vii+269.

Robinson Crusoe and the Apparitional Eighteenth-Century Novel

Robinson Crusoe attempts to come to terms with his Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures (1719) and its sequels by retroactively injecting Providence into the story, but other supernatural forces exert more active narrative agency. With a subtle language of hints, impressions, and passive cogitation, Daniel Defoe implicates middling spirits as interlocutors who contact Crusoe at key moments. Unlike Providence, which Crusoe invokes to help order experience from the vantage of retrospection, a secret converse of spirits confronts characters before they make decisions, and this communication ultimately steers the plot. Crusoe, in turn, becomes apparitional as he projects an identity outside of the fictional frame without clarifying how his story is at once allegorical and historical. This double spectrality of spirits who influence realistic characters and realistic (but invented) characters who assert a kind of existence in society suggests a haunted narratology in the rise of verisimilar fiction, from the proto-novelistic Spectator papers to the sentimental novels of Samuel Richardson.

Themes of Invention, Help, and Will: Joachim Campe's Robinson der Jüngere in Tagalog and Bahasa Melayu Translations

IntroductionThis paper presents a preliminary comparative of the of Joachim Heinrich Campe's pedagogical work Robinson der Jungere (RDJ) into Malay-Hikayat Robinson Crusoe (HRC)-and Tagalog-Ang Bagong Robinson (ABR). Given the strong economic themes present in these works, and in Robinsonades in general, the shall be done from the point of view of the translation of political-economic concepts. Doris Jedamski explains why these types of translation analyses have not until recently been given the attention they deserve, despite their obvious advantages:. . . indigenous and adaptations of Western novels and their impact in colonial societies have so far found little scholarly attention. A possible explanation for this negligence is the general misapprehension that and adaptations are no more than the reproduction of European cultural products in indigenous languages, without the into cultural transformation that are present in novels by colonial subjects. (Jedamski 2002, 45)Since this study is partly intended to provide insights into cultural transformations by means of translation analysis, it does not aim to assess or measure fidelity or translational accuracy. Rather, it seeks to compare the systems and discursive elements informing the three texts in question. Its aim is to make use of the contrastive resources that the techniques of translation bring in order to probe into the specificity of discursive elements and histories in the respective texts being analyzed. Given this objective, the fact that HRC and ABR are relay translations of the original German text, from Dutch and Spanish respectively, can be considered a secondary problem in the context of the overall study. The will be read on their own terms with respect to their distinctive discursive characteristics. It is undeniable that as far as the receptor cultures and reading publics who are without access to the original language of the source text are concerned, these are, for all intents and purposes, stand-alone works. However, as much as possible some of the mediating will be consulted in order to refine the and establish the origin of some major textual differences. It should be emphasized in advance that this paper is not a study in linguistics but rather an exercise in attempting to combine what has been called discourse analysis and conceptual history.Text 1: Robinson der JungereDaniel Defoe's (1660-1731) novel with the full title The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an uninhabited Island on the coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pirates. Written by Himself, otherwise more briefly known as The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe or even just Robinson Crusoe, was first published in 1719 and is considered to be the first English novel. Due to its great success among the reading publics of Europe, it also became one of the most well-known and widely translated works in world literature.The mythos of Crusoe attained such a degree of popularity in eighteenth-century Germany that the term Robinsonade, referring to a distinct literary genre, was coined by the writer Johann Gottfried Schnabel (1692-1758) as early as 1731 to refer to works sharing similar themes and premises (Schnabel 1994). An enormous amount of critical and scholarly material on German literary Robinsonades accumulated up to the end of the twentieth century (Wegehaupt 1991; Stach 1996). Among the eighteenth-century German Robinsonades, the most popular and most successful on a Europe-wide scale was a two-volume educational work by the Enlightenment pedagogue Joachim Heinrich Campe (1746-1818) titled Robinson der Jungere: Zur angenehmen und nutzlichen Unterhaltung fur Kinder (The new Robinson: Agreeable and useful entertainment for children, 1779-80) (see Fig. …

Defoe’s Birth

In 1937, James Sutherland began his fine biography of the author of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner by describing the “unsettled and eventful world into which Daniel Defoe was born” before going on to point out, perfectly correctly, that: “The exact date of his birth is unknown.” “From various sources, however, one can make a fairly good guess,” Sutherland continued: “it is almost certain that Defoe was born in the autumn of 1660.”1 In fact, the reasons adduced by Sutherland suggest that Defoe was born in the autumn of 1659 rather than in the autumn of 1660. First, Defoe’s age is given as “ab[ou]t 24” in the license dated 28 December 1683 (not 24 December, as Sutherland has it) which authorized his marriage to the twenty-year-old Mary Tuffley on 1 January 1684.2 Second, in the Preface to The Protestant Monastery—included in both Maximillian E. Novak’s list of Defoe’s works in The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature: Volume 2: 1660–1800 (1971) and P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens’s Critical Bibliography (1998)—”Andrew Moreton, Esq;” writes: “Alas I have but small Health and little Leisure to turn Author, being now in my 67th Year, almost worn out with Age and Sickness.” The Protestant Monastery was dated 1727 on the title-page but actually published in November 1726. And a year later, in Augusta Triumphans, Defoe returns to his physical condition when he insists that: “I have but a short Time to live, nor would I waste my remaining Thread of Life in Vain.”3 There is a complicating factor, however: according to the Parish Register of St Giles, Cripplegate, “Elizab’ daugt’ of James Foe tallowchand’ & of Ailce [i.e. Alice?] not Christe[ned]: [was] borne June 19” in 1659.4 If this were the case, then Defoe patently could not have been born to James and Alice Foe in the autumn of 1659, let alone on 30 September—the date on which Robinson Crusoe is shipwrecked on his island, and which, according to some commentators, seems to have had some special significance for Defoe. Thus, in his study of Defoe’s Early Life, Frank Bastian acknowledges that, “[w]ith so many improbabilities, it would be rash to be dogmatic,” but nevertheless he goes on to explain that, “for the sake of convenience it will be assumed, when referring to Defoe’s age, that he was born on 30 September 1660.”5 Until recently, therefore, scholars have tended to assume, on the basis of the evidence of the Preface to The Protestant Monastery, that if Defoe had indeed entered his sixty-seventh year by November 1726, that he was probably born in the autumn of 1660. More recently, however, John Martin has asserted that the author, Daniel Defoe, who wrote The True-Born-Englishman, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters, and Jure Divino, as well as the series of narratives which we now know as Defoe’s novels, was born not in London in 1660, but in Etton, Northamptonshire, in 1644. The basis of Martin’s assertion is an entry in the Parish Register of the Church of St. Stephen, Etton, which he has posted as a jpeg on the website of the discussion group of the Defoe Society (Defoe@lists). The relevant entry reads: “Daniel the sonne of Daniel Foe & Hellen his wife was baptized 3 December.1644.” What Martin has yet to do, however, is demonstrate that the author of Robinson Crusoe is the subject of this entry in the Parish Register of St. Stephen, Etton. Instead, Martin argues that, in the absence of an entry in the Parish Register of St. Giles Cripplegate of the baptism of a son of James and Ailce Foe called Daniel, anyone who does not accept that the Daniel Foe baptized at Etton in 1644 is the Daniel Defoe known to posterity must demonstrate that the latter was indeed the son of James Foe, tallowchandler. This is a decidedly odd method of proceeding, particularly when the significant number of documentary references to Defoe that appear to indicate he was born around 1660 in London...

Robinson Crusoeas Defoe's Theory of Fiction

By grappling with secular and religious approaches to Defoe's fiction, this essay describes the theory of fiction that Defoe writes his way toward during the course of his three-book Crusoe novel, which includes The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and The Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The essay sets out to rediscover irony in the Crusoe novel itself—particularly the irony that gathers in its most religiously charged scenes—rather than looking for it, as most critics do, in the historical gap between our secular age and the late Puritan age of Defoe. Next, the essay finds the fullest expression of Defoe's procedures as a novelist in the parable of the atheists at the end of Serious Reflections, rather than in the prefaces that begin the three Crusoe books. In that concluding parable, Defoe finally reveals his ambitions as a novelist, plotting the exposure of his characters' fear and gullibility in regard to the supernatural in order to open them up to a greater sense of divine providence.

The American Hermit and the British Castaway: Voluntary Retreat and Deliberative Democracy in Early American Culture

From Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay's (1681-1759) decision to live self-sufficiently in a cave as a protest against slave labor, to African American recluses such as Robert Voorhis, the Hermit of Massachusetts (b. 1769/70), and Henry Box Brown (1815-c.1879), to iconic figures like Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), John Muir (1838-1914), Thomas Merton (1915-1968), and Edward Abbey (1927-1989), many Americans have expressed their critical voices through voluntary reclusion from society. last decade and a half of the eighteenth century, however, appears to have been an especially busy time for the American hermit. During this period, American printers published an unprecedented number of tales and anecdotes about the lives of hermits such as James Buckland's Wonderful Discovery of a Hermit.... (1786); Samuel Brake's An Account of the Wonderful Old Hermit's Death, and Burial (1787); The Hermit's Soliloquy (1788); Abraham Panther's A Surprising Account of the Discovery of a Lady.... (1788); the narrative of Amos Wilson's hermitic withdrawal as a result of his sister's trial and execution for infanticide (A Faithful Narrative of Elizabeth Wilson.... [1786] and Victim of Seduction!...... [1822]); Lavinia's The Hermitess; or, Fair Secluder (1790); Anne-Therese de Marguenat de Courcelles, Marquise de Lambert's Fair Solitary; or, Female Hermit (1790); and Peter Longueville's English Hermit (1795). (1) These seemingly ephemeral texts were reprinted numerous times in the 1790s, attesting to a sustained cultural interest in both male and female hermitic figures during the post-Revolutionary period. (2) This article examines the ways in which both the figure and practices of the American hermit are taken up as culturally resonant analogies for early American political subjectivity. first part of the article considers the popularity of the hermit in poems, almanacs, waxwork exhibits, and choral music of the 1790s to reveal a persistent fascination with the political relevance of hermitic life. article then attempts to delineate the generic parameters of what I am calling the hermit's tale, a previously unrecognized American literary genre characterized, most interestingly, by its rejection of the Robinsonade as a viable model of American political existence? Comparing American hermit tales alongside British antecedents such as Daniel Defoe's Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.... (1719) reveals how certain writers deployed the hermit to figure, on the one hand, American political and cultural independence from Britain and, on the other hand, a democratic practice grounded in studied deferral and nonpartisan deliberation. final sections of the article discuss the theological and philosophical implications of this critical stance by examining the Pennsylvania Hermit in Amos Wilson's Sweets of Solitude!.... (1822) and the hermitic Democrat in John O'Sullivan's essay Democracy (1840). study of the American hermit provides a unique lens through which post-Revolutionary American authors conceived of republican democratic practice as existing in the pause or retired moment between cultural binaries. hermit's political significance derives from his or her capacity to confront the aporetic conditions of a post-Revolutionary American national identity situated precariously at the boundary between solitude and society, public and private, Federalist and anti-Federalist, and Britishness and Americanness. GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE POLITICS OF THE AMERICAN HERMIT Perhaps the most significant indication of the young republic's interest in hermits is the persistent republication of British poems on hermitic life. From the 1750s well into the nineteenth century, Thomas Parnell's The Hermit, James Beattie's The Hermit, and Oliver Goldsmith's Edwin and Angelina (excerpted from Vicar of Wakefield) continued to be prominently published by American printers in numerous poetic anthologies of British verse, as individual texts, and as epigraphs to various nineteenth-century American novels dealing with reclusive life. …

"The Sum of Humane Misery"?: Defoe's Ambiguity toward Exile

Daniel Defoe's The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is usually given a place in the literature of exile, but just as Crusoe is divided between a terrible loneliness and a pleasure in solitude, Defoe too equivocated on this subject. His career as a spy often turned his personal life into a form of exile. His fictions dramatized the experience: through the sufferings of his spy in A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy at Paris and the resolve of his Russian Prince in Siberia told in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: Being the Second and Last Part of His Life , Defoe expresses the exile's longing for his home and acceptance of his fate.

Un-Erasing Crusoe : Farther Adventures in the Nineteenth Century

Cru[soe].… come Friday, pull out the Books, you have both Volumes, have you not Friday? Fri[day]. Yes Master, and me will make him swallow his own Vomit.… Swallow, swallow, Father D[a]n, your Writings be good for the Heartburn, swallow, Father D—n—so me have cram'd down one Volume, must he have the other now Master? Cru. Yes, yes, Friday, or else the Dose will not be compleat, and so perhaps mayn't work and pass thro' him kindly.1 For nearly a century the vast majority of Crusonian criticism has not only overlooked Daniel Defoe's The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), the second volume of his Crusoe trilogy, it has effectively erased it. Although for two hundred years it was widely read, considered an essential component of the Crusoe story, and published with The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) more often than the first volume was published on its own, The Farther Adventures was almost entirely eliminated after the Great War. Seldom since published, not only has the novel been cast aside, so too has its long history—by critics who are unaware that the Crusoe of our predecessors was a tale that included The [End Page 89] Farther Adventures. In this essay, I aim to recover Crusoe's lost past and, in particular, to document the insistent presence of The Farther Adventures throughout the nineteenth century. I offer statistics regarding the trilogy's publication; a description of how the rapid segregation of the third volume, Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720), reinforced the connection between the first two; explications of nineteenth-century texts; and an explanation of how bowdlerizations, continental influences, abridgements, and children's versions of Crusoe ultimately contributed to the separation of The Farther Adventures from the first volume. I conclude by briefly historicizing its erasure and suggesting some possible reasons as to why both readers and publishers eventually cast the second-volume mariner-merchant out to sea, so that finally even critics came to overlook the traces of his footmarks in the sand. My charts of the publication history of volumes 1, 2, and 3 (Figures 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5),2 which illustrate the inclusion of The Farther Adventures in Crusoe publications through World War I, are based on an analysis of Robert W. Lovett's Robinson Crusoe: A Bibliographical Checklist of English Language Editions, 1719–1979.3 Lovett lists 1198 editions of Crusoe published between 1719 and 1979. My charts, which do not begin until 1720, since it was not until then that all three volumes were simultaneously in print, include 1025 editions,4 all listed by Lovett; and although I discuss seven editions not listed by Lovett, who admittedly includes only "as many English language editions as [he] can find or about which [he has] sufficient bibliographical information" (L, xiii), they are not represented in the charts.5 Lovett limits his checklist to the first volume of Crusoe, "published by W. Taylor on April 25, 1719, and all subsequent editions whether abridged, modified, adapted, or epitomized, without respect to purity of text, and under whatever title, so long as it can be identified as Defoe's narrative of the man on the island" (L, xiii). While Lovett's checklist does not include editions of the second and third volumes published independently of the first,6 he does mention the latter two volumes "when they are part of a set" and describes them—for instance, how many pages they occupy in a given edition—"when the several [or the first two] parts are printed as a single narrative" (L, xiv). My calculations include reissues as well as abridgements7 of fifty pages or more.8 They include publications of the text(s) in anthologies and collections,9 but do not include variants, newspaper printings, or cartoons of any length. They are necessarily estimates, for several reasons. Due both to the...

Jane Austen's Aesthetics and Ethics of Surprise

����� ��� In a memorable scene in Joseph Andrews, Henry Fielding likens Lady Booby, sexually rebuffed by her virtuous servant, to “the statue of surprize” spoken of by poets. 1 Presumably, he invokes an old metaphor of astonished or fearful people as petrified, but the ambiguity of his phrase raises the possibility of a sculpture fashioned to represent an allegorical figure named “Surprize.” 2 If such a deity did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it as the presiding spirit of the eighteenthcentury novel, an emergent genre that signally promised to exceed the reader’s expectations, as well as the equally new discourse of aesthetics, which adopted surprise as a key term in the emotional lexicon of artistic experience. The full title of Robinson Crusoe’s narrative, to cite only one example, advertises the wayward sailor’s Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures, the adjective of the new modifying an old signifier of romance. Defoe’s title indicates both the strangeness and veracity of the narrator’s experiences: real rather than fantastical, and thus all the more surprising; or, in Michael McKeon’s formula for the epistemology of seventeenth-century newsballads and early novels, “strange, therefore true” (5‐6). What the adjective “surprising” adds to “strange” is affect—the emotional response activated by the extraordinary, the foreign, or the inexplicable. It also encompasses a wider range of experience, since not everything that is surprising is necessarily strange; the mundane, too, can be arresting. In its participial ambiguity, the word aptly suggests the intersection of characters and readers in the eighteenthcentury novel: both are meant to be jolted out of ordinary patterns of perception and thought; both will be seized by an experience of the new. As an adventure-narrative, Crusoe promises an aesthetic form of surprise (delight in the new); and as a spiritual autobiography of self-correction, it delivers a salubrious moral surprise (the experience of being jolted from inattention into awareness).

Exposé of the Popular Heroine: The Female Protagonists of Eliza Haywood

Expose of the Popular Heroine: The Female Protagonists ofEliza Haywood MARY ANNE SCHOFIELD Eighteenth-century fiction bristles with unforgettable women charac­ ters. Pamela Andrews and Clarissa Harlowe, on the one hand, are models of Christian virtue and behavior, while Moll Flanders and Fanny Hill, on the other, are women of little virtue but extraordinary sexual power. And as protagonists of the acknowledged masters of the eighteenth-century novel, Pamela Andrews, Clarissa Harlowe, Sophia Western (Tom Jones), and Fanny Goodwill (Joseph Andrews), to name the most prominent, have been adequately examined by critics and scholars. Such is not the case, however, with the heroines of the popular, though minor, female novelists of the period, most especially Eliza Haywood, whose first novel, Love in Excess; or, The Fatal Enquiry (1719), rivaled Defoe's Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and Swift's Gulliver's Travels as "the most popular English fiction of the eighteenth century be­ fore Pamela."1 Haywood had intimate knowledge of women's problems in the eigh­ teenth century; she left her husband, the Rev. Valentine Haywood, and supported herself and her two children by her literary efforts. With a few exceptions,2 each of her novels concerns itself with the heroine and her problem of self-identity. Just as Mary Astell (Serious Proposal to the Ladies, 1697) and Defoe (Essay on Projects, 1692, 1697) were concerned with the state of women's education and Richard Steele (essays in The Tatler and The Spectator) with their position in the family and society, so Haywood, the first popular novelist to investigate the feminist milieu to such an extensive degree, deals with an even more basic need: a woman's 93 94 / SCHOFIELD concept of self, an understanding of herself as an independent, selfcontrolled , perhaps even an aggressive person. It is this quest for feminine identity which forms the basis of Haywood's novels. The majority of her novels of her first period (1720s and 1730s)3 depict the troubled situation of the divided heroine who is unable to reconcile diverse elements within herself and accept her position in society; she ends her struggle in exile or death. The novels of her later period (1740s and 1750s) offer a more con­ servative portrait of the virtuous heroine who is tested throughout the novel but remains true to her virtue and her womanly position and is hap­ pily rewarded with marital bliss at the conclusion. A study of Haywood's heroines and the novels in which they appear not only rekindles interest in Eliza Haywood but also, because of the sheer abundance and popularity of her work (sixty-odd romances, nov­ els, and secret histories, excluding her translations of continental ro­ mances, poetry, and other prose) provides us with the most comprehen­ sive treatment of the "woman question" in the period and allows us a brief look at the impact of the popular novel upon the traditional conceptions of "woman," "wife," and "mother." Like the eighteenth century itself, the novel was undergoing revision. With both, it was the changing status of women that accounted for the upheaval. Murial Williams observes that the "position of women, especially of the middle class, was changing dras­ tically because of a decline of industry in the home and the corresponding mechanization and centralization of industry."4 Because women were less in demand at home, they turned to other areas in which they could assert themselves. The large number of minor female novelists during the eigh­ teenth century is just one facet of this new movement, while the increased number of female novels readers is another.5 Haywood caters to this growing and influential group of women in her numerous romances and novels. To them she presents a pattern of femi­ nine behavior during this period of the eighteenth century. Her character­ istic fable of feminine distress, of persecuted virtue, was natural to her as a novelist alert to the preoccupations of her audience, for the cult of eighteenth-century womanhood was centered on the encounter between a sexually aggressive male and an innocent, superior female — a fictional­ ized portrayal of readers' sense of traditional conduct.6 Because the moral values of the bourgeoisie supported and aided...

Robinson Crusoe: “Allusive Allegorick History”

In recent years much has been made of Robinson Crusoe as an epic of economic quest and conquest—one unfortunately impeded, however, by what James Sutherland calls “boggy stretches of moralizing.” Here I will suggest that some of the major tenets of the modified Calvinistic theology articulated in those moralizings are paralleled by a series or system of traditional Christian symbols which embody that doctrine, and so I propose a reading which takes the work to be precisely what Crusoe says it is—an “allusive allegorick History,” intended originally not only to delight but also to instruct. A complete study of this kind would draw its evidence not only from The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, but also from its continuation, The Farther Adventures, and their sequel, The Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With His Vision of the Angelick World—all three volumes “Written by Himself.” Furthermore, it would orient the symbolic elements of the work within the context of Defoe's other works and of traditional Bible exegesis particularly as it was expressed in the pietistic literature of the Puritans in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This exploratory study can treat only a selection of basic images and symbols, particularly from the narrative of the first two volumes of the work itself; for their context in exegesis—and aside from occasional illustrative materials— it must presume to some extent upon the reader's familiarity with some of the main traditions of Christian symbolism and the prevailing characteristics of the varied and extensive Puritan literature of piety.