Travellers
Travellers in the 18th century literature
During the 18th Century privileged young Englishmen often filled their time between a university education and the beginning of a career with an extended tour of continental Europe. The Grand Tour is in essence a British invention because by the 18th Century Britain was the wealthiest nation in the world and had a large upper class with both the time and the money to travel.
Two classics of world literature Robinson Crusoe wrote by Daniel Defoe and Gulliver´s Travels wrote by Jonathan Swift have important places in the history of English novel. Swift had been Daniel Defoe´s main competitor in the field of journalism for twenty years, and it is obvious from Gulliver´s Travels that he had been influenced by Defoe, both in the adoption of fiction as a vehicle for his purpose, and in the use of a plausible, matter-of-fact realism.
Robinson Crusoe, desperately lonely on his desert island, is the first significant example in English literature of the prudential hero: he took some coins on the wreck, even though he knows they will be of no use to him. Crusoe represents exactly the kind of attitudes which were eventually to make Britain the richest country in the world and lead her to establish a vast overseas empire.
Crusoe, like Defoe himself, was so thoroughly the embodiment of the social and economic drives of the early eighteenth century. The concentration on the practical and the rational left little room for any real exploration of character. There is not any exploration of personal relationships: Crusoe´s attitude towards marriage is the reverse of romantic - in his typically practical view it was “neither to my advantage or dissatisfaction”, but nothing more. He uses more the practical sight than his feelings when he should deal with most of situations and also he shows inability of acknowledge everything different from himself. Swift uses Gulliver’s Travels to describe human nature and society of that period Robinson
During the 18th Century privileged young Englishmen often filled their time between a university education and the beginning of a career with an extended tour of continental Europe. The Grand Tour is in essence a British invention because by the 18th Century Britain was the wealthiest nation in the world and had a large upper class with both the time and the money to travel.
Two classics of world literature Robinson Crusoe wrote by Daniel Defoe and Gulliver´s Travels wrote by Jonathan Swift have important places in the history of English novel. Swift had been Daniel Defoe´s main competitor in the field of journalism for twenty years, and it is obvious from Gulliver´s Travels that he had been influenced by Defoe, both in the adoption of fiction as a vehicle for his purpose, and in the use of a plausible, matter-of-fact realism.
Robinson Crusoe, desperately lonely on his desert island, is the first significant example in English literature of the prudential hero: he took some coins on the wreck, even though he knows they will be of no use to him. Crusoe represents exactly the kind of attitudes which were eventually to make Britain the richest country in the world and lead her to establish a vast overseas empire.
Crusoe, like Defoe himself, was so thoroughly the embodiment of the social and economic drives of the early eighteenth century. The concentration on the practical and the rational left little room for any real exploration of character. There is not any exploration of personal relationships: Crusoe´s attitude towards marriage is the reverse of romantic - in his typically practical view it was “neither to my advantage or dissatisfaction”, but nothing more. He uses more the practical sight than his feelings when he should deal with most of situations and also he shows inability of acknowledge everything different from himself. Swift uses Gulliver’s Travels to describe human nature and society of that period Robinson