The Importance Of Realism In Robinson Crusoe

Naturally, the birth of a new genre in literature, had brought within itself a new point of perspective on life and the essence of living. If early narratives had been a chance to escape the realities of life, the new genre was totally opening the curtains to the real world. Being exhausted of the fairies, gods, monsters, or heroes of the medieval literature and the rebirth of classicism on the Renaissance stage, a thirst for stories of common people, for real place and time, had been emerged. Instead of reading about royal characters or heroes that are fighting with dragons, the thought that the main persona of the text could be a neighbour, was challenging and fascinating for the readers, and thus, the new genre was considered distinct from the earlier literary works. Daniel Defoe was the first in England to combine all these new changes in the form of writing and to give life to the first English novel, Robinson Crusoe. Yet, the first to feel the rift between the real life and literature’s direction towards idealism was not Defoe, but Cervantes. Cervantes created a character who confronts these two tendencies of reality and idealism. His human confrontation with the world is the idealistic phase in which Don Quixote lives a perfect utopian world of chivalry, and the …show more content…
Robinson Crusoe is a novel of extreme importance, for it gives an exhibition of a man that in times of economic and social depression struggles to make a future. The capitalism that was sweeping England in 18th century, was the movement that inserted in men’s mind the need of developing and acquiring of an economic, social, and political position. Thus, Robinson Crusoe being a character who realizes that his constant role is to work in order to gain an individuality, reflects the common situation of working class and middle class in