“Power/Knowledge” as the Unifying Principle for Tobias Smollett's Loosely-Structured and Eclectic Collection of Novels

• Main Authors: Simon White, 白思明
• Other Authors: Pen-shui Liao
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/8mmn5c

博士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 97 === Few people are reading Tobias George Smollett. The flow of criticism--never a flood--slowed to a trickle in the latter half of the twentieth century. This dissertation seeks to reverse this unwarranted slide into the obscurity of ‘minor’ literature, arguing for Smollett’s continued relevance in terms of his, and his characters’, struggles to preserve identity in a period threatening any such convenient certainties. Michel Foucault’s “Power/Knowledge” is used to illuminate the depth and magnitude of the change, both to the distribution of power and to the places for individuals within it. It is argued that Smollett adopted and abandoned many generic literary forms as they served or failed to serve to reflect the position of the individual within the new social establishment of the mid-eighteenth century. Chapter One details this historical shift for government and the governed. Chapter Two uses Smollett’s first novel, Roderick Random, to focus on the (picaresque) depiction of man’s, or woman’s, efforts in the face of a hostile world. Chapter Three examines Smollett’s growing frustrations with the limitations imposed by his traditional literary form, and on his extensive modifications to it in Peregrine Pickle and Ferdinand Count Fathom. Chapter Four follows the development of Smollett’s most overt political expression of protest, and highlights the drawbacks associated with a polemical literature of political engagement. Finally, Chapter Five concludes with his adoption of an apparently ideally suitable form--the modified epistolary narrative--which seems to reflect both the individual in crisis and supply the need for a certain voice of political commitment. This dissertation maintains that, whereas Foucault jettisons any serious notion of an individual with agency in power/knowledge, Smollett manages to retain the integrity of the individual in command of a will and in possession of a choice, and he deserves to be read in this light.