Contagious Texts: Digression and Repetition as Antidote in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year
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This paper examines the formal experimentation in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) within the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English print culture. Rather than trying to solve the formal conundrum of whether the Journal is fact or fiction (or a strange combination of both), I argue that Defoe includes various texts such as the government’s mortality bills, the quack doctors’ bills, and the mayor’s orders in his narrative to express his concerns about England’s ever-expanding print culture. By demonstrating how printed works closely resemble the bubonic plague in that they quickly spread among London’s citizens and transmit false (and potentially harmful) information, Defoe draws attention to the drastic rise in the number of unreliable publications that circulated in the public sphere due to the lapse in the state’s licensing system. It is my argument that he seeks to counteract such instabilities in the regulatory system by experimenting with the narrative form in the Journal. In addition to using digressions such as those of the three men to contain the untrustworthy information other less credible texts circulate within the narrative, Defoe uses repetition to critically examine and correct the printed instructions the mayor’s office distributes in order to prevent the plague from spreading. In doing so, Defoe develops the formal means by which he establishes the credibility of his account. Although the matter of how successful he was in his efforts remains an issue of contention, I assert that Defoe endeavors to establish print’s authoritative status as a vehicle of knowledge, a cause he both promoted and hinderied throughout his literary career.
Abstract
This paper examines the formal experimentation in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) within the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English print culture. Rather than trying to solve the formal conundrum of whether the Journal is fact or fiction (or a strange combination of both), I argue that Defoe includes various texts such as the government’s mortality bills, the quack doctors’ bills, and the mayor’s orders in his narrative to express his concerns about England’s ever-expanding print culture. By demonstrating how printed works closely resemble the bubonic plague in that they quickly spread among London’s citizens and transmit false (and potentially harmful) information, Defoe draws attention to the drastic rise in the number of unreliable publications that circulated in the public sphere due to the lapse in the state’s licensing system. It is my argument that he seeks to counteract such instabilities in the regulatory system by experimenting with the narrative form in the Journal. In addition to using digressions such as those of the three men to contain the untrustworthy information other less credible texts circulate within the narrative, Defoe uses repetition to critically examine and correct the printed instructions the mayor’s office distributes in order to prevent the plague from spreading. In doing so, Defoe develops the formal means by which he establishes the credibility of his account. Although the matter of how successful he was in his efforts remains an issue of contention, I assert that Defoe endeavors to establish print’s authoritative status as a vehicle of knowledge, a cause he both promoted and hinderied throughout his literary career.
참고문헌 (25)
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