Scarica The theme of Travel in Defoe and Swift e più Temi in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Elaborato di Inglese Esami di Stato a.s. 2019/2020 Travelling is certainly an adventure leading to better self-knowledge and to the discovery of one's limits and strenghts, which allows new personal awareness. The travel as the search for his own identity. Travelling is a life experience that brings important inner changes and the best way for a person to know and explore the world and himself. Travel is therefore one of the most appreciated theme in literature and every literary epoch and artist deal with it according to his own ideology and historical period. Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift, the most influential writers of the Augustan Age, chose this theme for their novels. In fact, in this period, writers began to write to please a public of middle-class, which has grown and wanted to spend money on books. In this context there was the rise of the novel which was the perfect genre to entertain people. Daniel Defoe was fascinated by the idea of sea voyages, adventures and exploration and for this reason he wrote almost exclusively travel books. He became a novelist in 1791 when he published his first novel "Robinson Crusoe". Defoe's novel is considered the first modern novel and the story is told by Robinson himself. The plot revolves around the story of a young man called Robinson Crusoe who belongs to the middle-class. Against his father's advice, he decides to go to Brasil in order to search for his own identity. But Robinson's adventure begins when his ship sinks during a bad storm and he is shipwrecked on a desert island. Here, he must use his intelligence in order to survive. One day he rescues a prisoner from some cannibals and he names him Friday. The relationship between Friday and Robinson is an essential element of the novel because it shows the fact that Robinson is a colonial hero. Robinson Crusoe was uncomfortable in the presence of "savages" until his experience with Friday. In fact he brings civilization to Friday, giving him a name and teaching him european clothes, language and religion. The most obvious point about Friday's relationship with Crusoe is that Friday is Crusoe's subordinate. He always calls Robinson "master," for example. However, there are two main views of their relationship: the master - servant relationship, as evidenced by the authoritarian way in which Crusoe treats Friday, and the father - son relationship, in that Crusoe does seem to genuinely care for Friday's well-being. Why does Crusoe not see Friday as his equal? Crusoe's dominant relationship to Friday produces an interesting dynamic between the two of them. An interesting point is expressed in the passage we have studied, where Robinson describes Friday in details. In the lines 1-15 he describes Friday as a good-looking young man whose most beautiful features are those that most resemble a European's . In this passage we can see also Crusoe's dislike of non- European races when he praises Friday for not looking too much like a typical coloured
