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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... described him thus: “For one who was so widely read by his contemporaries he was a strangely isolated figure, both as a man and as a writer,” and so discerning an admirer as James Joyce called him “the first English author . . . to ...
... described and objectified so that we can see abstraction, understand the moral, and recognize that people are more alike than different. Pope can write, “My Life's amusements have been just the same, / Before, and after Standing Armies ...
... described the arduous work of the serious poet in A Vindication of the Press (1718). “Haste,” he wrote, “is attended with a fatal Consequence,” and he went on to contrast the relative ease of prose writing to the composition and ...
... described poets as “partaking of celestial fire” and as creators of 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 ...
... described explicitly. Words like “medley,” “common,” “mixture,” and “jumbled” are repeated and multiplied until the idea that “A True-Born Englishman's a Contradiction, / In Speech an Irony, in Fact a Fiction” becomes an indisputable ...
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 |