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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... (Satire II, ii, 153-54), and Swift can give us Count Munodi in Book III of Gulliver's Travels. Defoe and writers like him demand that their readers see change, admit the complexities and confusions in the world, and, above all, recognize ...
... satires reviewed the situation in a biased manner, characterized the major participants, and insisted that only fools or knaves could hold the opinion opposed by the author. Clandestinely printed or circulated in manuscript, they were ...
... satire on public affairs became the dominant poetic genre, and as evidence of such poetry's popularity grew, the writing of poetry came to be seen as a means of achieving recognition and appointment to a party position. A number of men ...
... satires about city politics.17 Defoe uses the loose narrative framework grown popular after Paradise Lost, and his metaphors and allusions are the clichés of his time: the unthinking extremists are “Jehudriven” and Englishmen are ...
... satiric portraits of men like the Earl of Feversham and Sir Peter Rich seldom rise above the level of turnof-the-century abuse: “As much a Souldier, and as much an Ass. ...” As mediocre as this poem is, A New Discovery exemplifies what ...
Contents
THE HISTORIES | |
THE HISTORICAL NOVELS | |
CRIME AND ADVENTURE | |
ROXANA | |
MELTED DOWN FILLED WITH WONDERS | |
NOTES | |
BIBLIOGRAPHY | |
INDEX | |