The Plague Writing Of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal Of The Plague Year

As a novel written by Defoe in 1721 in response to the plague in Marseilles,A Journal of the Plague Year retells the plague in 1665 in London.This paper takes plague writing as an entry point to explore how Defoe writes about the plague from the religious,political,and moral perspectives,and explores how Defoe’s plague writing inherits and transcends the English plague writing tradition in the light of English history and other plague writing materials.The main body of the paper is divided into three chapters.The first chapter analyzes the plague writing of A Journal of the Plague Year from the purpose of the plague,the causes of the plague,and the sources of the plague,it is explained how the plague metaphor presents the religious characteristics of moralization,relationship,and sanctification.It is argued how the writer presents the treatment of the disease in the novel to strengthen the perception of the plague as a disease in the theological framework.In addition,It explores the writing of plague to endue people the meaning of fighting against plague and convey the realistic purpose of Puritan thought in writing plague.The second introduces the relationship of plague and the British political tradition.After that,the political metaphor of the plague is extended outward to the British Empire,and how the writer portrays the countries around Britain as the “other”by presenting the origin and spread of the plague,and conveys the writer’s imperial consciousness.Understanding the imperial anxiety latent in the plague writing.The third chapter starts from the moral metaphor of plague,explores the two-way causal logic of plague and morality,and analyses the moral events presented in the novel.Explore the humanistic care and ethical value behind the moral problems in plague writing plague.A Journal of the Plague Year is a masterpiece of plague writing in early modern England.Defoe recreated the Great Plague in London in 1665 in a multi-angle and allround way.On the basis of inheriting the tradition of plague writing in England,it conveyed personal thoughts on plague and religion,politics and morality as a foothold,and achieved a breakthrough in literary and ideological writing.