英国文学选读unit5课件.ppt

Unit2 Adventure Fiction Writers Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) Daniel Defoe, the son of a butcher, was born in London. He received a good education in one of the best dissenting academies. Instead of becoming a clergyman, he became a hosier(袜商) and traveled in Spain, Italy, France and Germany. He was a merchant and was once rather wealthy. He was always interested in politics. During the “Glorious Revolution”, he was a loyal supporter and took great interest in establishing the new government. However, whether because of his adventurous speculation(投机) in business or on account of the disastrous losses in shipping resulted from England’s wars with France, Defoe was forced into bankruptcy in 1692. In his seventy years of life, Defoe passed through all extremes of life: from poverty to wealth, from prosperity to obscurity, from Newgate Prison to immense popularity and royal favor. All this is obscure enough in detail, but two facts stand out clearly and are worth mentioning. First, Defoe was a jack-of-all-trades(多面手)—a merchant, soldier, economist, journalist, pamphleteer(活页文章作者), publicist(宣传家) and novelist. He was famous for his versatility and was at least good at journalism and novel-writing. In English literature, he was often given the credit for the discovery of the modern novel. But Defoe the novelist came out of Defoe the journalist; he once conducted several papers, the most popular one of which was The Review. As a journalist, he had a reporter’s eye for the picturesque and a newspaperman’s instinct for making a good story with simple, smooth and colloquial English. This partially accounts for the great popularity of his works. Another fact about Defoe is that he knew about prison life. In 1702, when proposals for increasing discrimination against dissenters(持异议者) were introduced, Defoe published an anonymous pamphlet, “The Shortest Way with the Dissenters”, advocating the most extreme measures to eradic