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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... God, or other such embarrassingly mundane topics and to eschew classical models for loose prose was to sacrifice an Olympian position. Decorum, restraint, and reason legislated against these “low” subjects, against the psychological ...
... God, we are once again come among Christians.” Taught to value classical genres and to admire Dryden, Swift, and Pope, Defoe's contemporaries and our own accepted “Neoclassicism” and failed to find a place for Defoe in literary history ...
... gods. These poets not only affirmed the traditional functions of public poetry, but they also saw the usefulness of poetry as a mode of discourse or even argument. Taught from youth to write poetry and to imitate classical and English ...
... God's actions in the affairs of men and man's limited vision. The poem did use psychology in an interesting way; it presented man's “fancies” regarding news of the war in Spain and described his ambitions, his guilt over defeat, and his ...
... God-sake—you'll offend”) are but dramatizations of this kind of conventional mingling of the individual poet and the traditional stance as defender of Truth. An Elegy is the closest Defoe came to writing the traditional satiric apologia ...
Contents
| 3 | |
| 12 | |
| 42 | |
4 THE HISTORIES | 70 |
5 THE HISTORICAL NOVELS | 120 |
6 CRIME AND ADVENTURE | 152 |
7 ROXANA | 182 |
8 MELTED DOWN FILLED WITH WONDERS | 215 |
NOTES | 241 |
BIBLIOGRAPHY | 267 |
INDEX | 289 |