デフォーと合邦のレトリック : 1707年合邦と『見えざる手』
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概要
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This paper aims to grasp the political and socio-economic background of the Union of 1707 and the characteristics of Daniel Defoe's social thought through an examination of his major historical work, The History of the Union of Great Britain (1709). On the eve of the Union, Defoe served as an English spy among Scottish people and witnessed a surge of their anti-English passions firsthand. The works by Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, the most influential contemporary Scottish republican writer, embodied these antipathies in a very sophisticated manner. Defoe paid close attention to both the republican thought and its vocabulary typically expressed in Fletcher's texts and managed to combine them with the rhetoric of divine providence. This was an intellectual activity for the creation of a historical narrative in which the distressed Scottish people could finally find relief. Defoe's History of the Union asserted that the conflicts between England and Scotland had been transmuted into peacemaking factors by the leading of providence. Some contemporary affairs were considered as examples: the foundation of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies, Massacre of Glencoe, Act of Settlement in England, Act of Security in Scotland, Alien Act in England, and execution of Captain Green after seizing of the ship Worcester in Scotland. While recounting these affairs, the present paper focuses on the nature of the rhetoric to which Defoe appeals. His appeal to "an Invisible Hand" represents a concealing design, that is, to appease the complex feelings held by those living in North Britain. His History of the Union seems to have been written to persuade them rather than to preserve historical facts themselves.
- 2011-07-25