1. A modular approach to
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
And Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
2. ROBINSON CRUSOE
•The plot is taken from a newspaper, it is derived from a fact,
really happened to John Silkirk
•The author developed his story around this nucleus.
•There is the continuous interpolation of an omniscient narrat
who recalls the past, makes digressions, comments and judges,
a suitable device to keep the reader’s attention high as well as
maintaining a conversational gossiping tone.
•The narrator reveals a profound interest in
concrete matters,
3. ROBINSON CRUSOE
in food and sleep, but even in the exploitation of the island
sources.
•He is not interested in the wild beauty of the desert island,
but only in building up the same comforts, he had previously
at home.
•The way Robinson lives on the island is a suitable
springboard to a full understanding of an 18thC middle
class man’s attitude towards money, religion,
funds, economy and law.
4. ROBINSON CRUSOE
•Even 18thC newspapers offer an acute perspective of the
English society with its thirst for power, fame, success,
with its devotional religious spirit, with its contract-making
economy and with its strict sense of justice and order.
•The language itself employed by the author witnesses the
influence of journalism, it meets the new reader’s taste.
•Archaisms are abandoned, adjectives are reduced,
•Strong emphasis is given to descriptive verbs
•Abstractions are disappearing.
5. ROBINSON CRUSOE
•In spite of the simplicity of language, colloquialism is
avoided and a certain awareness of language dignity is saved
FAILURES
• the lack of characterization and that of structure,
•Robinson does not develop during the novel,
but he saves his creed, his prejudices in spite of the external
events.
6. ROBINSON CRUSOE
•The novel does not present a whole story, but almost
a sequence of events, sketches in which the hero or better,
the anti-hero is involved.
•Defoe seems to recall the picaresque tradition of
Cervantes or the isolated adventures reported in some
newspapers’ pages.
7. HENRY FIELDING
•He described comic situations in an epic structure
•Cervantes’ Don Quixote as his model
•He presents a well knit combination of episodes, structur
and organized in an organic unity
•The setting is made up of streets, highways and various
itineraries
•There is a large range of characters to give rise to the co
•There is no individualization in the portrayal of
characters
8. HENRY FIELDING
•All the novels offer a realistic picture of the 18thC socie
•There is no idea of Puritan punishment
•Anyway there is a lurking moral message: men tend
naturally towards goodness; he wants them to
understand that virtue is better than vice and laughter
can be used to defeat immorality
•There are no strong sentimentalistic events
•Social denunciation is carried out indirectly
9. HENRY FIELDING
•Irony is always broad and witty
•He did not believe in the usefulness of all-good or
all-bad characters, because no such people really exist in
life. So he creates people sometimes contradictory in their
mixture of vice and virtue, but as adherent as possible to
reality and endowed with human nature
•A great attention he paid to lower rank characters, not
because of egalitarian principles, he did not believe in, but
because of his deep interest in all human beings
