Gulliver's Travels and Silas Marner
"By detailed reference to Gulliver's Travels and Silas Marner, identify characteristics of genre. What similarities and differences do the two texts present in terms of their form?"Genre is a French term meaning "type", "sort" or "kind". The literary category or types (for instance, the main literary genres are poetry, drama and prose narrative) to which the work belongs and with whose conventions or characteristics it might be compared. We become aware of genre through cultural experience. A genre can be a literary form like a novel. Gulliver's Travels and Silas Marner are both prose fictions however it is debatable whether they are novels in the conventional sense. Gulliver's Travels (1726) and Silas Marner (1861) were written over 100 years apart. Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels in the eighteenth century whereas George Eliot wrote Silas Marner in the nineteenth century. It was in the early years of the eighteenth century that the novel as we know it began to be written, this was the birth of the novel however many books of the time were not fully-fledged novels. The nineteenth century includes two periods, the Romantic and the Victorian, Eliot wrote Silas Marner in the Victorian period. There were three major m
The Lilliputians are also, for example, allegorical Whigs. Religion it seems is the only theme these books have in common. " (Author's Preface) Here Swift is suggesting that satire is comparable to a mirror, that satire reflects society. There were no classical models for it". The development of the novel can be traced through the development from Gulliver's Travels to a more fully-fledged novel such as Silas Marner, "Jonathan Swift's satirical writings - and especially his Gulliver's Travels (1726) - are extremely important staging-posts for the novel. In comparison, Swift and Eliot use themes. In conclusion, Gulliver's Travels and Silas Marner have their own very unique characteristics of genre which make them very different, and the similarities between them are limited. Swift himself defined Satire in his book Battle of the Books (1704) as "a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so few are offended with it. In contrast, the Houyhnhnms are creatures, which look like horses and are perfect animals, to Gulliver they represent the human ideal. Whereas, in Silas Marner the narrator speaks in the omniscient third person, a narrative technique that allows the narrator to be all knowing and all seeing, "This is the history of Silas Marner, until the fifteenth year after he came to Raveloe. Silas Marner uses 'unliterary' language, slang words and a regional dialect such as "Ay, ay" and "Eh", for example, throughout the novel. The realism novel offers a reality that people will recognise but not necessarily a reality they are familiar with. Both books have a protagonist, Gulliver and Silas.
Common topics in this essay:
Silas Marner,
Gulliver's Travels,
English Novel,
Master Marner,
Dutch Lilliputians,
Godfrey Cass,
Genre French,
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allen 39,
wrote silas,
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Acceptance Essays
