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Read the Classics 2008-2009: 1600s & 1700s Novels
This is the archive for the 2008-2009 reading, lecture and discussion series focused on the early novels of the 1600s and 1700s. Robert S. Knapp, from Reed College led the discussions.
At Hillsdale Library
The titles for the 1600s & 1700s Novels series
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
- Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
- Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
- Candide and Other Stories by Voltaire
Printable Read the Classics, 2008-2009: 1600s & 1700s Novels flyer (pdf)
Meet your professor
Robert S. Knapp, is the Reginald F. Arragon Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College, where he has taught for 34 years. His doctorate is from Cornell University. He is a specialist in Shakespeare and early modern literature. In addition to his book Shakespeare: The Theater and the Book, Princeton 1989, he has published numerous articles and is working on another book tentatively entitled Circe's Rod: Shakespeare and the Disciplines of Culture.
Overview
The Early Novels of the 1600s & 1700s
When 100 writers from 54 countries were recently asked to vote for the "most meaningful book of all time," they chose Don Quixote. Miguel de Cervantes' tale of misguided heroism gained 50% more votes than any other book. The list. Many call Don Quixote (1605 & 1615) the first novel, ignoring both the precedence of Apuleius's The Golden Ass (150-180 A.D.?), and many others, and the later development of what is called the “true” modern novel. Two English forerunners of the "true" novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Gulliver's Travels (1726), have captured readers' imaginations for generations. To many, these are much more enjoyable than Richardson's Pamela (1740) often called the first "true" novel. Another variation is that of the philosophical novel, as shown in Voltaire's little wonder, Candide, (1759).
The books discussed in this series possess common themes of travel and adventure. Each is a fun romp that also takes us to the depths of the human condition. Writers in England and on the Continent were influenced by each other's works, so we will look at Spanish, English and French early novels. As a group they formed the basis for the full flowering of the novel in the 1800s.
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
One of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha chronicles the picaresque adventures of the noble knight–errant Don Quixote and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through 16th century Spain. We will be reading Edith Grossman's definitive and very fluid English translation of the Spanish masterpiece. If you ever thought Don Quixote a challenge to read — Grossman makes it a pleasure! Cervantes published Don Quixote in two parts; the first in 1605 and the second in 1615. We will be reading both parts in order to get the full experience. Don Quixote is perhaps the greatest and most influential work of Spanish literature, as a foundation for the Spanish and Latin American imagination and as a spring board for all of modern Western literature. If you saw the movie Man of La Mancha you might have the impression that Don Quixote's adventures were sweet and romantic. His deeper romanticism and madness are much more vividly cast when you see this beat up old knight attack real people, for whatever reasons he imagines, with realistic consequences. It is a great book filled with many stories within the main story. It also creates a poignant vision of human life that will stay with you for years to come.
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
As the full title puts it: "The life and strange surprizing adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, mariner : who lived eight and twenty years, all alone in an uninhabited island on the coast of America, near the mouth of the great river of Oroonoque, having been cast on shore by shipwreck, wherein all the men perished but himself : with an account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by pyrates, written by himself." Early in the story we find that Crusoe's ship is taken over by pirates, and Crusoe becomes the slave of a Moor, just as the real Cervantes was before he wrote Don Quixote. Daniel Defoe may have based his tale on the actual story of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who lived more than four years on an island in the Pacific. This was during the time Britain was exploring and colonizing the world. The British were fascinated by stories of travel and the strange places, peoples, and experiences that were so different from the homes and shops of Britain. When Crusoe is shipwrecked, his struggles to build a protected place to live and to plant food reflect the values and survival skills of English house-holders (who were avid readers of this book) as well as of colonialists. As a colonialist, when he meets "my man Friday," he naturally makes him his servant. Robinson Crusoe is sometimes viewed as a book for youth, and indeed it is a fast moving adventure, but you also see Crusoe deal with moral dilemmas such as cultural relativism in the question of what to do about the cannibals he finds on the island. As an examination of the self–reliant man, it makes an interesting study of human nature. Come find out why this early novel has been so widely and repeatedly published and accepted as classic literature, along with his more fully developed novels Moll Flanders and Roxana.
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
We all know what is thought of as the children's story of Gulliver's travels to Lilliput where he is a giant compared to the Lilliputians and to Brobdingnag where he is the tiny one. Children's editions of the book stop there, omitting the deep satire of the rest of Jonathan Swift's classic book. Gulliver's Travels is not as profoundly bitter as his A Modest Proposal, perhaps the most bitter satire ever written in English. In Gulliver, he hooks the reader with the first two phenomenally imaginative stories and then continues on to the biting commentary on human nature, morals, government, mortality/immortality and science that is his real purpose. After Brobdingnag, Gulliver encounters further amazing peoples, situations and inventions in four more imaginary countries, followed by Japan, as Swift's satire sharpens its edge. After returning to England, where he hoped to stay for the rest of his life, he takes one more trip, and ends up in the country of the Houyhnhnms, where the horses are the sentient beings. There you will meet the Yahoos. You may never think of that word or human nature in same light again! Like Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels is told as if written by Gulliver. The full title is: "Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships." In fact Swift did not sign his book and passed it off as being written by Gulliver. As with Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels appealed to the wanderlust of its time, a time when the real things people were discovering around the world were not that much less startling than the imagined.
Candide by Voltaire
Like Gulliver's Travels, Candide has been called a "philosophical romance." Do we live in the "best of all possible worlds" as Leibniz asserted? Voltaire pokes fun at Leibniz by personifying his philosophy of optimism in the character of Dr. Pangloss, Candide's philosophy tutor and sometime traveling companion. The Oxford English Dictionary confirms that Leibniz coined the word "l'Optimisme," and that the word optimism "owes its general diffusion to the satirical attack upon the doctrine by Voltaire in Candide ou l'Optimisme (1759)." Voltaire, who was considered the greatest intellectual of the Age of Enlightenment, treats us to the most witty excursion through the philosophical world as well as the loves, adventures and misadventures of Candide through Europe, South America and the Ottoman Empire. How many terrible things can happen with Candide still asking if this is the best of all possible worlds? Along the way Voltaire takes on governments, theologians, war and so many other aspects of his world that he had to publish Candide secretly in several countries simultaneously to avoid having it banned and having all the copies confiscated. This brief, delightful and highly influential book will make you laugh and think at the same time.
The edition we are reading, Candide and Other Stories, translated by Roger Pearson, also includes several of Voltaire's short stories. We will only discuss Candide, but we offer the other stories for your reading pleasure. Micromegas, an early science fiction story, gives us the comments of gigantic visitors from another planet about the conditions of earth. Then we meet Zadig, a philosopher in ancient Babylonia. To hint at the range of Voltaire's writings we also have a mythological story, The White Bull, and a verse tale based on Chaucer's The Wife of Bath's Tale, called What Pleases the Ladies. What must the pre-revolutionary people of the British colonies in North America have thought about a Huron's (American Indian) comments on liberty and the religious establishment in the Breton region of France in The Ingenu?
Book descriptions by Tom French, Librarian.
Made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities Fund of The Library Foundation.
