The bending of genre: Generic conventions, fiction, and empiricism in the travel narratives of Addison, Defoe, and Smollett (Joseph Addison, Daniel Defoe, Tobias Smollett).

摘要

By the beginning of the eighteenth century the empirical ideology of the “new” science dictated specific approaches to observing, recording, and understanding all phenomena. The consequences of empiricism stretched further and deeper, however, as the penchant for “facts” became so insistent that it left little place in the discourse for aesthetic concerns. Chapter One of the study examines the generic conventions of travel literature, and traces their origins to the empirical ideology that arose in the seventeenth century.; Chapter Two focuses on Addison's Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, and addresses the author's attempt to construct the aesthetic by using the unique narrative framework of quotations from Roman poets. Addison's strategies are placed within the context of the empirical ideology and the radical reform of prose style in the second half of the seventeenth century. Such a contextualized reading of the text permits Addison's narrative strategy to stand out as a clear attempt to expand the range and imaginative possibilities of the genre.; The third chapter examines Defoe's Tour. It places the author's economic agenda in light of the aesthetic, so that Defoe sees the economic power of Great Britain in terms simultaneously aesthetic and utilitarian. His narrative strategies in the Tour differ significantly from his practice in the novels, and these distinctions point to the generic differences the author had in mind when composing his works.; Smollett's Travels is the focus of the final chapter, which continues to explore the question of the aesthetic construct and investigates its status in terms of fictional and novelistic techniques. In Smollett's travel account, the idiosyncratic and the peculiar, the personal and the accidental (all of which were attributes at odds with the convention of the genre as posited by the empirical mode) unapologetically are made a part of the narrative.; The conclusion suggests that progress towards the construction of the aesthetic is evident in the three works closely examined.