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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... Occasional Conformity and the modern party poet; in the first, Defoe finds the perversion and wilful misunderstanding of religion; in the second, the perversion and betrayal of English patriotism. Reformation of Manners (1702) is a ...
... Occasional Conformity, which Defoe continues to oppose vigorously; the more important subject is conscience as concept (“The secret Trepedation” that can “rack” souls and is stronger than courage, resolution, or law), and both subjects ...
... Occasional Conformity Bill), 1710 (the time before its passage), 1714 (the passage of the Schism Bill), and 1717 (when Parliament considered restoring full rights to the Dissenters). In them, he needs to address Whigs and Tories ...
... Occasional Conformity and The Opinion of a Known Dissenter on the Bill for Preventing Occasional Conformity, Defoe argues that the Bill is a matter of indifference to Dissenters because no true Dissenter is an Occasional Conformist. He ...
... Occasional Conformity and High Church extremism. He could hardly expect to influence the Tories who had been fooled into approving The Shortest Way, and no one of any political or religious persuasion could benefit from championing ...
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 |