1812 Novels (Study Guide) - The Absentee, the Swiss Family Robinson, Kelroy (Paperback)

This is nonfiction commentary. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: The Absentee, the Swiss Family Robinson, Kelroy. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: The Swiss Family Robinson (German: Der Schweizerische Robinson) is a novel, first published in 1812, about a Swiss family who are shipwrecked in the East Indies en route to Port Jackson, Australia. Written by Swiss pastor Johann David Wyss, and edited by his son Johann Rudolf Wyss, the novel was intended to teach his four sons about family values, good husbandry, the uses of the natural world and self-reliance. Wyss's attitude towards education is in line with the teachings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and many of the episodes have to do with Christian-oriented moral lessons (frugality, husbandry, resignation, co-operation, etc). The adventures are presented as a series of lessons in natural history and the physical sciences and resemble other similar educational books for children in this period, for example, Charlotte Turner Smith's Rural Walks: in Dialogues intended for the use of Young Persons (1795), Rambles Further: A continuation of Rural Walks (1796), A Natural History of Birds, intended chiefly for young persons (1807). However the novel differs in that it is based on the model of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, a genuine adventure story, and presents a geographically impossible array of mammals including pangolins, porcupines, capybaras, camels, monkeys, lions, leopards, tigers, bears, onagers, peccaries, wild boars, tapirs, mustangs, kangaroos, elephants, hyenas, wolves, giraffes, jackals, walruses, platypuses, koalas, wombats, dingos, zebras, bison, rhinos, hippos, and moose and a flora that probably could never have existed together including the rubber plant, flax, coconut palms, sago palms, and Myrica cerifera on a single island for...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=45457