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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... included satire and prophecies, and Cooper's Hill ends on a political note. The type enjoyed considerable popularity; William Diaper's Dryades (1713) combined history, topography, politics, and patriotic sentiments in the form of ...
... included poems, riddles, classical analogies, fables, and literary allusions to explain the Whig position on such things as foreign policy and Parliamentary Succession. Jonathan Swift used far more classical satiric devices, such as ...
... included rogue biographies, accounts of topical scandals, opinions on issues such as the Puritan controversies, and news of all sorts. Because of their length, they could be more moralistic, speculative, and dramatic than modern news ...
... included and drew attention to all the parts of a typical sermon: “Scripture,” explication of Scripture, explication of doctrine, application to the congregations' lives, confutation, and “prayer.” In this mock sermon, he argued that ...
... included emblems, historical examples, anecdotes, and colloquial speeches. As Bonamy Dobrée has pointed out, Defoe's style was flexible and lively. He describes a representative quotation from Everybody's Business is Nobody's Business ...
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 |