Daniel Defoe: Ambition and InnovationIn this book, Paula Backscheider considers Daniel Defoe's entire canon as related, developing, and in close dynamic relationship to the literature of its time. In so doing, she revises our conception of the contexts of Defoe's work and reassesses his achievement and contribution as a writer. By restoring a literary context for modern criticism, Backscheider argues the intensity and integrity of Defoe's artistic ambitions, demonstrating that everything he wrote rests solidly upon extensive reading of books published in England, his understanding of the reading tastes of his contemporaries, and his engagement with the issues and events of his time. Defoe, the dedicated professional writer and innovator, emerges with a new wholeness, and certain of his novels assume new significance. Defoe's literary status continues to be debated and misunderstood. Even critical studies of the novel often begin with Richardson rather than Defoe. By moving from Defoe's poetry, pamphlets, and histories to the novels, Backscheider offers an argument for the thematic and stylistic coherency of his oeuvre and for a recognition of the dominant place he held in shaping the English novel. For example, Defoe deserves to be recognized as the true originator of the historical novel, for three of his fictions are deeply engaged with just those conceptual and technical issues common to all later historical fiction. And Roxana now appears as Defoe's deliberate attempt to enter the fastest growing market for fiction—that for women readers. What have been powerfully significant for the history of the novel, then, are the very characteristics of his writing that have been held against his literary stature: its contemporaneity, its mixed and untidy form, its formal realism, its concentration on the life of an individual, and its probing of the individual's psychological interaction with the empirical world, making that world representative even as it is referential. It is exactly these characteristics most original, prominent, and subsequently imitated in Defoe's fiction that define the form we call "novel." |
From inside the book
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... Dissenter who assents to Occasional Conformity and the modern party poet; in the first, Defoe finds the ... Dissenters, the pamphlet for which Defoe was convicted of seditious libel and pilloried, and the cathexis of this ...
... Dissenters who accept Occasional Conformity are like St. Paul (“ToDay would Christian Proselytes Baptise, / To Morrow Hebrew Converts Circumcise”). In four devastating lines, Defoe dismisses those who adopt these spurious arguments: “To ...
... Dissenter, and Prior had worked in a tavern, but that was seldom mentioned, while Defoe's origin and past were continually brought to mind by his behavior, his arrests, the point of view he took, and the habit he had of speaking out ...
... Dissenters, another fifty-five or so on the recurrent threat of the Jacobites, some thirty-five on the Scottish Union, more than thirty on the debates that led to the Peace of Utrecht, and dozens of others on such controversies as the ...
... Dissenters themselves. His first, A Letter to a Dissenter from his friend at the Hague (1688), was part of the literature warning Dissenters that James II's Declaration of Indulgence was hypocritically manipulative and coercive. He ...
Contents
THE HISTORIES | |
THE HISTORICAL NOVELS | |
CRIME AND ADVENTURE | |
ROXANA | |
MELTED DOWN FILLED WITH WONDERS | |
NOTES | |
BIBLIOGRAPHY | |
INDEX | |