Self And Other Narrated By Defoe

Degraded as a literary prostitute by his contemporary elite literary circle,Daniel Defoe stands out rather exceptionally for being a highly versatile writer in the arena of English literature.His first foray into novels,Robinson Crusoe,achieves worldwide popularity as a prototypical adventure account.But the sequel published four months later,which exhibits Defoe's ongoing exquisite writing techniques as well as acute political and social consciousness,remains rather limitedly read and studied.This thesis,with a focus on the image of China,analyzes the inconsistent dichotomy of self and other constructed by Defoe in the second volume The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.In view of Defoe's clear aim of "moral teaching and autobiographic pursuit",this thesis also employs the mode of travel writing to study the novel as a whole.The first chapter conceptualizes travel and travel writing,to provide a different perspective to approach the work.It also includes a theoretical conception of self and other,locating the image of China as "the other" which is frequently gazed upon in the Western travel writings.The following chapter,with a basis of close reading,locates the image of China in the novel,namely,"the image of Chinese cities" such as Nankin and Pekin,"the image of Chinese Mandarin and Populace",and "the image of China Ware and The Great Wall”.It showcases Defoe's or Robinson's condescending and antagonistic attitude towards China,which is represented in a rather shadowy but negative way.The third chapter explores how the image of China is negotiated in the wider discourse of self and "others",which is informed by a forming colonial discourse.It examines the images of Scots,Tartars,Portuguese and Russians to elucidate on the inconsistent dichotomy between self and other constructed by Defoe.Proposing that Defoe employs China as a metaphorical image constructed in"imaginaire social",this chapter also draws upon Mohsin Hamid's allusion of China in the novel Exit West which represents a quite different image of China set in the globalizing world context.The conclusion part argues that travel writing as a mode not only provides writers like Defoe an adaptive tool to report on far-flung China,but also provides scholars with a useful tool to look into the representation of foreign images.With the contrast made between Defoe's image of China and Hamid's image of China,the thesis also contends that the study of the image of China should take into account the intricate relation between the Western image of China and the world image of China,since the latter is likely to represent a new developing China to be noticed in wide ranges of the world.