Shadows, Tokens, Spring Mauk, Ben
The Virginia quarterly review,
10/2022, Letnik:
98, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Hang a marmot or a goat at the head and cut the skin around its neck, one recipe instructs. Some salt, one or two peeled onions, and a number of stones, that have been heated up in a fire for about ...an hour. The restless doctor John Bell left a more detailed description in his only book, the two-volume Travels from St. Petersburg in Russia, to Diverse Parts of Asia: "On these hills are a great number of animals called marmots, of a brownish color, having feet like a badger; and nearly of the same size. There are marmots across the American prairie-not to be confused with the smaller and more social prairie dog, another Sciuridae-and across the Great Eurasian Steppe that extends from Hungary to the Great Wall that Marco Polo did not describe, where since 2008 the tarbagan has been listed as an endangered species.
Michael B. Prince. The Shortest Way with Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Deism, and the Novel (Charlottesville: Univ of Virginia, 2020). Pp. 350. $35.Michael Prince argues that Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe ...contains a thickly veiled satire aimed at specifically one person, and that for over 300 years, scholars have missed it. There seems to be several reasons for this oversight, but four primary ones are: the overwhelming amount of information that scholars must sift through (including commentaries by his enemies), Defoe's use of Deism as a narrative cover, the evolution of his writing technique, and the development of the novel. Prince's book is reminiscent of a mystery novel that begins by setting up the crime, and then follows the detective sussing out the culprit through a series of questions that build to the proof.Chapter 1, “The Puzzle and a Clue,” starts not with who Defoe's target was, but with the question, “How did this happen?” How have scholars missed this pointed attack? His answer: too much information has obscured this search. Prince...
Scholars of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe have identified terrestrial concepts like land enclosure as keys to understanding Crusoe's colonial practices. Building on the field of oceanic humanities, ...however, I argue that Crusoe's claim to the island derives from his understanding of the sea as open to possession. Specifically, this article argues that Crusoe uses the island's distance from European maritime routes to mark it a claimable space outside European sovereignty. He also appropriates indigenous seafaring knowledge and maritime networks before converting the island into his own overseas colony by plying imperial routes of traffic and trade.
Watelet's treatise, as a material object, exemplifies Condillac's theory of sensorial knowledge—most notably, the double experience of touch—through its representation of both self and external ...world, Watelet, and the art of painting. Stephen Fragano, Colonizing Land by Sea: Oceanic Trade and Travel in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe Scholars of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe have identified terrestrial concepts like land enclosure as keys to understanding Crusoe's colonial practices. Chelsea Phillips, Accommodations for Pregnancy and Childbirth on the Late Eighteenth-Century London Stage Drawing on close examination of surviving financial, biographical, and repertory records, this article demonstrates the existence of a number of accommodations for childbearing women at Covent Garden and Drury Lane between 1768 and 1800, including paid leave policies and repertory changes.
Revisiting Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) in tandem with a selection of medical sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this essay examines the ethnocultural ...underpinnings of plague. Although plague approximates community to its imagined outsiders through a shared sense of precarity, the divide between the two paradoxically stays intact. This paradox is amplified in the recurrent use of the orientalist trope of "Turkish predestinarianism" in Defoe's novel and medical texts contemporaneous with it. The epidemiological orientalism encapsulated in this notion, this essay argues, is animated by paradoxes that have the figurative effect of holding Londoners together in their isolation by distancing them from the ethnocultural other.
This article examines Daniel Defoe's The Consolidator (1705), a prose fiction work on a voyage to China and to the moon, from the perspective of science in the early eighteenth century. By analysing ...the references to experimental inventions in the text and reconstructing their scientific background, this essay argues that in The Consolidator Defoe creates a fictional space in which readers can familiarise themselves with the epistemological ramifications of contemporary scientific ideas, particularly the Newtonianist standard of demonstrative knowledge. In doing so, this essay offers a reassessment of Defoe on two counts. First, it investigates Defoe's attention to the questions raised by Newtonianism to challenge the claim that Defoe's interest in science mainly lay in early Royal Society empiricism from the 1660s and the 1670s; and, second, it focuses on the imaginative qualities of The Consolidator to problematise its interpretation as a work mainly animated by topical concerns.
From the perspective of social theory, Daniel Defoe's Novel Robinson Crusoe is a fable of importance. The tale of Robinson Crusoe is a product not just of the European social transformation but also ...of the expansion of western civilization. In Defoe's view, fiction was a special kind of historical writing. In Robinson Crusoe, he expressed his thoughts on the social and political order of his time. Through Robinson's adventure, Defoe exposed the enslavement of colonies by European countries, and criticised the injustice of maritime empires at their foundation. In the desert island, Robinson used his hands to meet his own needs, creat wealth and restore the civilisation. The Robison in island was a metaphor that presented the natural laws of production and order, and demonstrated the natural foundation of wealth and civilisation. For Defoe,wealth and civilisation were rooted in natural reason and human labor. More importantly, through Robinson's interaction with Friday, Defoe allowed the readers to see the nobl
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