MINISTRY OF HIGHER AND SECONDARY SPECIAL EDUCATION OF THE REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN
GULISTAN STATE UNIVERSITY
The English and Literature department
Khusainova Ilvina’s qualification work on speciality 5220100, English philology on the theme:
Daniel Defoe and his Novel “Robinson
Crusoe”
Supervisor: Ten E. V.
Gulistan-2006
Contents:
I. Introduction:
1.1 Some words about Daniel Defoe’s literary activity
1.2 Daniel Defoe and his novel “Robinson Crusoe”
II. The main part.
2.1 Daniel Defoe and his personality.
2.2 The source of the “Robinson Crusoe’s Adventures”
2.3 Robinson Crusoe’s way to Russia to Uzbekistan
2.4 Robinson Crusoe and his character
2.5 Some words about translation of the novel
III. Conclusion
3.1 The English literature in teaching English
IV. Bibliography
V. Appendix
Introduction
This graduation qualification work is dedicated to the study of Daniel Defoe’s world famous novel “Robinson Crusoe”. The theme is very interesting and is worth of paying special attention. Uzbek readers enjoy reading the novel immensely. The book is rightly included to the list of masterpieces even created by Daniel Defoe. The author’s work is estimated and read both by grown ups and children. Daniel Defoe founder of the early bourgeois realistic novel and he was the first and fore most a journalist, and in many ways the father of modern English periodicals.
Here we read one more fact: “The review” which he founded in 1704 and conducted until 1713, is regarded as the first English newspaper. It paved the way for the magazines “The Tattler” and “The spectator” Daniel Defoe was born in London in a family of non-conformists =сектанты= диссиденты= (those who refuse to accept the doctrines of an established or national Church, especially those protestants who form the Church of England.
The tasks we put before us in our graduation qualification work are:
1. To consider Daniel Defoe as the founder of realistic novel.
2. To show how contradictory was his worldview. He was not stable in his political attitudes towards the parties and the government of his time.
3. The impetus and the reason, also the origin the source of Robinson’s plot.
4. We think that Daniel Defoe and his work came to Uzbekistan and Russia and Robinson became famous thanks to creative activity of the Russian translators.
All above mentioned matters are discussed in the Introduction and Chapter One. The next Chapter- Chapter Two is devoted to the description of the main hero’s character. The whole paper is mainly about the merits of the writer and Robinson’s history.
5. We also paid great attention to the Russian and Uzbek translations of
“Robinson Crusoe’s Adventures”
6. We think that it is necessary to stress the educative significance of the events.
In the conclusion we wanted to shame the real place of the novel for our future generation.
Daniel Defoe and his novel “Robinson Crusoe”
Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” (1719) is the first true novel. It demands special and deep study. To study the novel we should commence with our thoughts about English enlightenment. As one of the prominent literary figure of the XVIII century England Daniel Defoe is the founder of the European realistic novel of the new time. This book is rightly included to the circle of the beloved works of the children, so its educational significance should be underlined especially. We have to use the history of English enlighteners in connection with Defoe’s literary activity. we may mention that the English Enlightenment is closely connected with the German Enlightenment use may match mainly the ideas of Enlightenment in Goethe’s work. Daniel Defoe was the son of his time, and of his class, it means that he expressed the ideas of the existing classes. He may be described as a bearer of the world view of the their progressive people’s ideas.
The work of the earlier novelists of the eighteenth century has a drive and coherence from their excitements realizing congenial possibilities of the new species of writing. They were pioneers in the novels of Defoe, H. Fielding and Sterna the tastes and sensibility of their authors are everywhere pelted.
Defoe and Richardson are the first great writers in the English literature, in this they differ from Jeffrey, Chancer, Edmund, Spencer, William Shakespeare and John Milton.
The history of Robinson’s life on the island is a story about creative work of a man, about his courage, his will, creative searching. This is a hymn to labor the source of life. Thanks to his creative work Robinson Crusoe remained a man. This is most remarkable and educative significance of the novel. The novel joined the elements of biographical documentary and adventure novel. The theme of creative labor should be emphasized especially Labor helped Robinson to stay a man in inhuman conditions of his life many years lonely in an island. There are very few selected books which can complete with this world known novel.
Daniel Defoe is not only the author of “ Robinson Crusoe” he is the author of, as his researchers consider, about four hundred separately published works, polemic and publicist articles, pamphlets and so on. Which had been published by him in different editions. Creative energy of Defoe was extraordinary and almost unique for his country and his time, his people.
Daniel Defoe had various hardships but he could fight for survival with astonishing steadfastness staunchness. Defoe could become one of first English professional journalists, editors of influential political newspapers and even private secret of very high ranking persons. Very important Person (Vips) of the government. But in a situation of complex and severe social and political fight he could not fairly well to do and even quite existing for himself. Political Discords strafes pains (низо, шифок,) and court intrigues brought him to the prison and to a Pillory. But in spite of all these. Defoe continued to write and publish books, booklets, and articles about everything which seemed to him worth of informing his contemporaries.
During more than three years Defoe openly, anonymously and under other pennames published pamphlets on very sharp political and international problems. He also wrote philosophical and law treatises, economical works, hand books, guides, manuals (йул – йурикдастурланаллар, кулланмалар) for traders, advices for those who were going to get married, all kinds of advices how to behave oneself in the society a poem about painting, general history of handicraft trades, and so on and so forth. Daniel Defoe used to say that he was thirty times rich and poor.
The huge library of written and used by him works wonder us not only with their great member, but also with quantity of names, as well as with their belongings to different fields of life and knowledge, which his creative curious thoughts and ideas none of those works were published under his own name.
Defoe published them giving the authorship to the heroes, Rescuing his books for real manuscripts or diaries, written in the name of the first person. These were the writings of sailors and merchants, thieves and court intricate plotters and all types of adventurers. This feat was the reason for not considering Daniel Defoe as their author, even two centuries later.
The works of fiction, newer appear abruptly. Most of them are closely connected with the time of their creation, so this is true concerning “Robinson Crusoe” as well.
Daniel Defoe and his personality
(1660-1731) Daniel Defoe is famous was an English novelist, journalist and pamphleteer, famous for "Robinson Crusoe," "Moll Flanders," "Memoirs of a Cavalier," and many other works. He was one of the founders of the English novel. Read more about the life and works of Daniel Defoe.
1) Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas
by Macmillan E. Novak. Oxford University Press. From the publisher: "Novak illuminates such works as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, novels that changed the course of fiction in their time and have remained towering classics to this day. And he reveals a writer who was a superb observer of his times—an age of dramatic historical, Daniel Defoe is perhaps best known for his novels, Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, but he was also the quintessential "brilliant scoundrel" of the Augustan Age. In rough chronological order, Daniel Defoe was a hosier, soldier, wine merchant, factory owner, bankrupt, spy, pamphleteer, and convict, journalist, editor, political flunkey, hack writer and novelist.
In 1704, he launched the Review of the Affairs of France and of all Europe, one of the first serious political and economic newspapers in England (it folded in the aftermath of the 1712 Stamp Act). He served as editor on several other newspapers later. As a trader and nonconformist, Defoe's produced several political and social commentaries hailing the dawn of the bourgeois-capitalist age.
In the service of Robert Harley, a shadowy figure of Queen Anne's reign, Defoe's produced a detailed three-volume (1724-27) account of the economic, political and social conditions of the cities and country-sides of Great Britain. His talent was dissipated in later years when, as a political journalist, he compromised his independence as a reporter in return for political favors.
Born Daniel Foe, the son of James Foe, a butcher in Stoke Newington, London He later added the aristocratic sounding "De" to his name as a nom de plume. He became a famous pamphleteer, journalist and novelist at a time of the birth of the novel in the English language, and thus fairly ranks as one of its progenitors.
Defoe's pamphleteering and political activities resulted in his arrest and placement in a pillory on July 31, 1703. Principally on account of a pamphlet entitled "The Shortest Way with Dissenters", in which he ruthlessly satirized the High church Tories, purporting to argue for the extermination of dissenters. The publication of his poem Hymn to the Pillory, however, caused his audience at the pillory to throw flowers instead of the customary harmful and noxious objects, and to drink to his health.
After his three days in the pillory Defoe went into Negate Prison. Robert Harley. 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer brokered his release in exchange for Defoe's co-operation as an intelligence agent. He set up his periodical A Review of the Affairs of France in 1704, supporting the Harley ministry. The Review ran without interruption until 1713. When Harley lost power in 1708 Defoe continued writing it to support Go dolphin, then again to support Harley and the Tories in the Tory ministry of 1710 to 1114. After the Tories fell from power with the death of Queen Anne. Defoe continued doing intelligence work for the Whig government.
Defoe's famous novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), tells of a man's shipwreck on a desert island and his subsequent adventures. The author may have based his narrative on the true story of the shipwreck of Alexander Selkirk. (Sec Robinson Crusoe: Selkirk as the inspiration for Crusoe).
Defoe's next novel was Captain Singleton ( 720), amazing for its portrayal of the redemptive power of one man's love for another. Hans Turley has recently shown how Quaker William's love turns Captain Singleton away from the murderous life of a pirate, and the two make a solemn vow to live as a male couple happily ever after in London, disguised as Greeks and never speaking English in public, with Singleton married to William's sister as a ruse.
Defoe wrote an account of the Great Plague of 1665: A Journal of the Plague Year.
He also wrote Moll Flanders (1722), a picaresque first-person narration of the fall and eventual redemption of a lone woman in 17th century England. She appears as a whore, bigamist and thief, lives in The Mint, commits adultery and incest, yet manages to keep the reader's sympathy. This work and Roxana, The Fortunate Mistress (1724) offer remarkable examples of the way in which Defoe seems to inhabit his fictional (yet "drawn from life") characters, not least in that they are women.
Daniel Defoe died on April 21. 1731 and was interred in Bun hill Fields. London. [edit] Defoe and the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707
No fewer than 545 titles, ranging from satirical poems, political and religious pamphlets and volumes have been ascribed to Defoe. His ambitious business ventures saw him bankrupt by 1692, with a wife and seven children to support. In 1703 he published an ironic attack on the high Tories, and was prosecuted for seditious libel, sentenced to be pilloried, fined 200 marks, and be detained at the Queen's pleasure. In despair he wrote to William Paterson. the London Scot, and founder of the Bank of England and part instigator of the Darien Disaster, who was in the confidence of Robert Hartley, leading Minister and spymaster in the English Government. Hartley accepted Defoe's services and released him in 1703. He immediately published The Review, which appeared weekly, then three times a week, written mostly by himself. This was the main mouthpiece of the Government promoting the Act of Union 1707.[1]
Defoe began his campaign in The Review and other pamphlets aimed at English opinion, claiming correctly that it would end the threat from the North, gaining for the Treasury an "inexhaustible treasury of men" a valuable new market increasing the power of England. By September 1706 Hartley ordered Defoe to Edinburgh as a secret agent, to do everything possible to help secure acquiescence of the Treaty. He was very conscious of the risk to himself Thanks to books such The Letters of Daniel Defoe, (edited by GH Healey, Oxford 1955) which are readily far more is known about his activities than is usual with such agents.
His first reports were of vivid descriptions of violent demonstrations against the Union. "A Scots rabble is the worst of its kind," he reported. Years later John Clerk of Penacook, a leading Unionist, wrote in his memories that,
"He was a spy among us, but not known as such, otherwise the Mob of Edinburgh would pull him to pieces."
Defoe being a Presbyterian, who suffered in England for his convictions, was accepted as an adviser to the Assembly of the Church and Parliamentary Committees. He told Hartley that he was "privy to all their folly", but "Perfectly unsuspected as with corresponding with anybody in England." He was then able to influence the proposals that were put to Parliament and reported back: "Having had the honor to be always sent for the committee to whom these amendments were referred, I have had the good fortune to break their measures in two particulars via the bounty on Corn and proportion of the Excise."
Yet Defoe was also a devout Presbyterian, faithful husband, doting father, and genius of the first order, a man who invented both modern journalism and the modern novel in his furious forty-year career. His greatest achievement, Robinson Crusoe, is a masterpiece of religious prose that has appeared in over 1,200 editions in English alone, has been translated into almost every known language, and continues to instruct delighted readers, as it has for nearly three hundred years, on the basics of Christian civilization by means of one of the most exciting adventure stories ever penned.
How to reconcile the two Defoe’s? This is the mystery that any biographer must confront, and one that Richard West only partially resolves.
The enigma begins with Defoe's birth. We remain uncertain about his year or place of birth, although 1661 in the parish of St. Giles, Cripple gate, seems likely. Raised a Dissenter—a Presbyterian in an Anglican nation—he was barred from Oxford and Cambridge and instead received three years of higher education under the Reverend Charles Morton, a future vice-president of Harvard University who drilled his pupils in science, modern tongues, and the intricacies of English rhetoric. Defoe learned his lessons well. He took away with him a superb prose style and a burning resentment of the upper classes who had denied him entrance to Oxbridge, coupled with a scarcely-disguised just to join their ranks—a blend of envy and hatred common among young middle-class men even today.
As West suggested, this ambivalence toward social betters was one of Defoe's driving obsessions. Another was his terror of debt and his sense of being hounded by creditors, as well as by literary and political opponents. Defoe relished the harsh world of late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century business, when capitalism was coming of age; unfortunately, he had an uncanny knack for investing in projects that left him in ruins. He traded in cows, bricks, tobacco, honey, land, diving bells, and even civet cats, almost always for a loss. By his early thirties, Defoe had squandered his wife's considerable dowry, was in debt for 17,000 pounds, and had declared bankruptcy—an act that barred him for life from public service. West describes the aftermath with typical empathy: "The torment of mind he suffered . . . condemned him to a life of misery, fear, loneliness, and remorse, from which he could only escape through prayer, the love of his family, and eventually by writing books."