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The Columbia History of the British NovelAs Moll Flanders puts it, "The Moral indeed of all my History is left to be gather'd by the Senses and Judgment of the Reader; I am not Qualified to preach to them, let the Experience of one Creature completely Wicked, and compleatly Miserable be a Store -35- house of useful warning to those that read." In brief, history is, for Defoe's narrators and readers equally, an instrument of knowledge. The two chief metaphors for this activity are the reading of history-situating the self in time-and the narrator's development of topographical or geographical knowledge-situating the self in space. Both metaphors presuppose that useful knowledge is primarily visual, just as reading must be thought of as a visual negotiation with graphic signs: a tract often credited to Defoe, An Essay upon Literature (1724), analyzes the development of systems of writing in different cultures, and argues that politically and economically viable cultures are literate, not oral. Thus, the claim in Colonel Jack, Memoirs of a Cavalier, Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe, and Roxana is that the narrator's account has been transcribed and edited from an orally delivered version ...» |
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