introduccion

that the science uses to be expressed is naturally the prose, to which is demanded clarity above all and to be lacking all seasoning and ambiguity. With this end the Royal Society designates in 1664-1665 a committee dedicated to perfect the English language. After one century in which the vernacular language had been developed with great freedom and exuberance, now it is tried to be organised and to polish the language, with a view to qualifying it for the expression of the new experiments and scientific conclusions. Thomas Sprat, author of the first History of the Royal Society, in 1667 describes the norms that should govern the new prose that above all should be direct, daily, of similar simplicity to the one of the mathematical and next language to the speech of artisans and merchants that to that of the men of letters and erudites.
The scientific activities, their methodology and their language influence this way directly in the writers of the period. The methods of precise observation and of exhaustive description, the total commitment with the truthfulness and the realism that the novelistic gender is imposed and that we find in particular in Robinson Crusoe, are largely to the new science. In accordance with the definition of Locke according to the purpose of the language is the one of "communicating the knowledge of the things", Defoe focuses in the description of the external qualities of the objects and stops minutely in the explanation of its number, extension, volume, solidity, etc., and in a much next language to that of the artisan and that of the merchant that to that of the intellectual, just as Sprat had suggested. Defoe is more qualified than any other person to make it because he takes twenty years writing in the newspapers with the intention and the imperious necessity of convincing. He is under good conditions to inaugurate some techniques that are characterised mainly by the literary realism. But a last reason that could have contributed in the perfection with which the new gender is inaugurated also exists: as puritan, Defoe was not able to but feeling very uncomfortable writing fiction, I mean, inventing stories and adventures that were not true. It is possible that he tries to palliate the falsehood of Robinson Crusoe and of their other creations of fiction with the help of trying that their lies were so likely that seemed true. A great imagination was naturally regarded for that..

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