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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... a court poet, Shakespeare was a member of the King's Men, Ben Jonson was poet laureate, and they thought of 3 themselves in those terms. The identification of political power, social • O N E • 1. THE BENT AND GENIUS OF THE AGE.
... King Alfred” (c. 890-99), and others have called it “the “orthodox' ethical and rhetorical tradition” resembling “a sort of central nervous system running through the whole eighteenth century.” Wherever one located its origins, its ...
... King James Bible. Here is Defoe's literary world. Defoe may have been more widely read than any of his literary contemporaries. A comparison of the evidence we have of Defoe's reading to that of, for example, Pope and Swift, suggests ...
... King William on the occasion of the victory at Boyne. From this point on, the call for a worthy poet willing to dedicate his life to the service of his country and to art, coupled with the writer's statement of his own unworthiness and ...
... King William's contempt and impatience with his subjects' behavior and explains how “His Conquering Mercy did his Justice stay.” Dryden has Charles speak: “Thus long have I, by native mercy sway'd” and “Must I at length the sword of ...
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 |