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." |
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... economic geographies, and the new forms of English prose fiction. All of this reading shaped his mind and his writing. He blended the traditional and timeless with fads and invented new forms and invigorated old. He was often a ...
... economy and a new recession raised new interest in colonization in the early 1720s even as countless new ... economic geography, and travel books. Similarly, a number of collections of cases of spirit appearances, such as ...
... her military prowess and her economic potential, and rehearse the reasons for the Union in specific enough detail that such fine points as the salt tax are mentioned. In spite of the fact that Defoe could write POETRY 37.
... economic, political, religious, or philosophical issue of current interest." These pamphlets met an immediate desire for information and were conceived as part of a controversy or concern and, even in the mind of the writer, as ephemera ...
... economic power, a vision of the influence united Dissenters might have. The final group of Defoe's writings about the Dissenters came in 1717, when George I gave them hope that the Occasional Conformity, Schism, Corporation, and Test ...
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 |