On The Pastoral Writing In Smollett’s The Expedition Of Humphry Clinker

Tobias Smollett(1721-1771)is one of the founders of the English novel in the eighteenth century.His literary talents bring him with remarkable achievements in the fields of fiction,history,drama and translation.In the novel,Smollett excels at delineating social customs and realities through adventure novels.The Expedition of Humphry Clinker(Humphry Clinker for short)is the last novel written by Smollett,which is also the landmark work to establish his status as a classic writer in the eighteenth century.The novel features in a Welsh family’s expedition around the city and the country,and shows what they see and hear along the way and their desire to retreat from the city among eighty-two letters.Scholars at home and abroad mainly focus on the stylistic attributes of the novel and some of them have made in-depth analysis on the novel’s rich and diverse theme: ethnic identity,body politics and religion implicit or explicit in the novel,but few scholars interpret this novel from the pastoral perspective.Therefore,this thesis is aimed to focus upon the pastoral writing by taking Humphry Clinker as the research object,concentrating on the presentation of the pastoral landscape and Smollett’s thoughts on the eighteenthcentury English city and country implied by the discourse of pastoral retreat.Meanwhile,the novel suggests the only way to cure social diseases against the backdrop of Industrial Revolution and return to the past pastoral is to establish pastoral virtues from both individual and communal levels,restoring traditional pastoral order.In this way,a harmonious development of man and self,man and nature,and man and society will be obtained.This thesis is comprised of five parts.Part One is a brief introduction,which mainly includes a brief introduction to Smollett’s cultural background and his novel Humphry Clinker,previous related studies at home and abroad,research keywords,the structure and research questions.Part Two explores the pastoral elements in the novel through the presentation of the pastoral landscape and the discourse of pastoral retreat,pointing out that Smollett has inherited the classical pastoral literary tradition since ancient Greece and has displayed a romantic pastoral in the novel.Part Three principally analyzes the realistic problems exposed by the city and the country respectively under the modernization process in the eighteenth century through the discourse of pastoral retreat,strengthening the function of criticizing social realities of pastoral writing.The fourth part discusses Smollett’s path of reconstructing pastoral.Smollett emphasizes the need to pursue individual and communal pastoral virtues in order to recover the lost pastoral by glorifying pastoral farmers,pastoral families,and pastoral communities characterized by geography and spirit.The fifth part summarizes the previous studies.This thesis interprets Humphry Clinker from the perspective of pastoral writing and concludes that the novel not only inherits the romantic characteristics of traditional pastoral literature,but also denounces the realities behind pastoral such as the gradual disappearance of pastoral landscape and the prevalence of consumerism on the context of urbanization and industrialization in the eighteenth century by taking pastoral writing as means.Smollett also suggests that restoring pastoral virtues can rebuild the past pastoral,which is a way to cope with the realistic dilemma of that era.Thus,returning to the traditional pastoral life marked by pastoral virtues is Smollett’s innermost yearning.