At the Roots of the Modern Novel – A Comparative Reading of Ihara Saikaku`s The Life of an Amorous Woman and Daniel Defoe`s Moll Flanders

The book focuses on the use of confessional mode in Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders and Ihara Saikaku's The Life of an Amorous Woman, two works of fiction, which, although written in two different cultural contexts, bear a number of narrative similarities. Both works attempt to create trustworthy narrators and use realistic techniques of depiction while focusing on details and enumerating tangible objects. Both describe vividly and colourfully the milieu and the characters while embracing the contradictions of life and personality. Finally, both use a mode of confession, displaying 'what occurs in the individual mind under the impact of the temporal flux,' which is a principle characteristic of the modern novel (Watt 22).The author delineates the development of narrative fiction in Japan and England (Chapter I), analyses the role of confession (or revelation) in the literary and cultural traditions of the two countries (Chapter II&III), and considers various intricacies of using confession as a narrative strategy in fiction (Chapter IV). The revelation of the narrators' past is accompanied by their conscious concealment of various details and by means of withholding certain information they succeed in attracting the attention of the audience and preparing a suitable setting for disclosure. Moreover, although Moll Flanders and the Amorous Woman, both experienced and advanced in years, yet sometimes showing naivety and ignorance characteristic of their childhood and youth, speak from the distance of time and place, they are entirely absorbed in their stories, frequently using the praesens historicum to emphasise the immediacy of what they narrate. The terms "novel" and "confession" are used in the book as broad categories, which enable – although not without reservations – a comparative reading of two works coming from two different backgrounds. The attempts to define the labels in the literary, historical and biographical contexts bring to the forefront not only the narrative traditions in England and Japan but also the present-day understanding of what the modern novel is.

Katarzyna Sonnenberg is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Jagiellonian University