(Download) "Property, History, And Identity in Defoe's Captain Singleton (Report)" by 1500-1900 Studies in English Literature " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Property, History, And Identity in Defoe's Captain Singleton (Report)
- Author : 1500-1900 Studies in English Literature
- Release Date : January 22, 2011
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 104 KB
Description
Capitalizing on the success of Robinson Crusoe (1719), one year later Daniel Defoe published The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies, of the Famous Captain Singleton, another seafaring tale about a castaway. This time, rather than issuing from a respectable family that urges him to remain in the "middle way," as Crusoe had done, Defoe's protagonist sets out from a much less advantageous condition, with no family and no home. Having been stolen from his parents as a child, Singleton has a less stable background than Crusoe: he is passed from a beggar to a gypsy, cast onto the parish, and then begins a roving life, moving from ship to ship until he joins an unsuccessful mutiny and gets stranded on Madagascar. In contrast to Crusoe's deliberate rebellion against the respectable middle way, Singleton's adventures are merely an extension of an already mobile existence. The result is a very different narrative and a very different narrator. While Crusoe's isolation on his island lends itself to the development of self-conscious reflection, Singleton is presented as a passive recipient of experience as he sails to Newfoundland and the East Indies, is marooned on Madagascar, crosses Africa from Mozambique to Angola, then, in the second half of the novel, becomes a pirate and travels around the West Indies, along the coast of South America, to the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Philippines. It is only toward the end of the novel, after Singleton has been introduced to a Quaker named William, who becomes one of Singleton's band of pirates and teaches Singleton the importance of a stable place of residence, that Defoe's protagonist is able to develop the kind of self-consciousness associated with Crusoe, the realist novel, and modern subjectivity. Captain Singleton makes especially visible the close connection between self-conscious thought and the concept of "home"--a term that recurs in the narrative with obsessive frequency as Defoe plays on the possible meanings of the word. (l) Quaker William imagines home as a geographically specific place that provides a centering space for identity and that gives meaning to action. Singleton, however, claims that "all the World was alike to me," so that he feels as much at home in the Pacific Ocean as William feels in England (p. 35). While William's emphasis on the affective bonds that home can provide resembles the idea of domesticity that underpins much later fiction, Singleton's definition of home represents an alternative possibility, one that does not associate identity with place, or even property. Rather than emphasizing a stable place that prompts a sense of affiliation and creates social cohesion, Singleton's conception of home--and his identity more broadly--exists only in movement and in the condition of being in-between. At the end of the novel, Singleton learns to subordinate his unconventional subjectivity to the more familiar social arrangements espoused by William, but for the greater part of the narrative, Singleton, personifying a mode of identity that operates outside the paradigms of possessive individualism, exists in a relation to the fictional world that is both anomalous and deeply suggestive.
 "Property, History, And Identity in Defoe's Captain Singleton (Report)" by 1500-1900 Studies in English Literature " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}