The physics of language in Roderick Random

Roderick Random goes from rags to riches in a series of unexpected events. He travels from Scotland to London, becomes a surgeon on board a war ship, takes part in the most violent battles of the 1740s, visits Bath and discovers the London underworlds. He is, thus, constantly in motion. As he moves from a social level to another, he encounters more than a hundred other funny characters, odd caricatures which compose altogether a scathing satire of Smolletts contemporary society. Roderick Random is a provocative novel. It plays with the political, economic and moral ideas of the time, and portrays the abuse of institutional authority. It overturns classical representations of the body, and explores the general instability of identities. This book offers an interpretation of the novel in its eighteenth-century context, giving the necessary historical background information to help a twenty-first century reader. It also features a great number of close-readings, scanning the poetics of Smolletts prose in which language is both a tool and a pleasurable end.