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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... poetic forms nor did he attempt to create an object of beauty, one worthy of contemplation because of its structure, language, models, subject, unity, and completion. The measure of art in the eighteenth century, however, has been ...
... poem. Some of Defoe's poems were indisputably popular. The True-Born Englishman (1700) went through ten authorized editions and at least twelve pirated editions in the first year. The Mock-Mourners (1702) was in its seventh edition less ...
... poetic ambition, became almost conventional. Dryden's retirement and death, and the deaths of John Oldham and Rochester, had broken the line of great English poets able to immortalize England's heroes, but the poets at the turn of the ...
... poems published in memory of deceased classmates, the volumes of verse produced by young men, and the frequent requests for occasional poems made by friends to men not known as poets testify to the unremarkable nature of poetry writing ...
... poems. Once appointed, the man often felt he was expected to continue to publish an occasional gentlemanly poem. Addison wrote that England's “prudent Bards” began to build up “stores of Flights and Magazines of Rhimes, / Prepar'd ...
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 |