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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... writing of this book was supported by the University of Rochester, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Endowment for the Humanities; their grants and the extraordinary work of University of Rochester librarians Phyllis ...
... writers of his time, and therein lies the problem with his literary reputation. Although he knew Latin, had studied the classics, and drew upon the ancients frequently and with facility, Horace and Virgil did not dominate his conception ...
... writing was formerly left to those, who by study, or appearance of study, were supposed to have gained knowledge ... writers who set the literary expectations of tradition, grace, and ease, and the modern reader therefore finds his ...
... writers attended to purely imaginative forms and to English prose style as they never had before. The proliferation of essays on good English style and of prefaces in which the author promised that the writing would be one of the ...
... writing. He blended the traditional and timeless with fads and invented new forms and invigorated old. He was often a conscious innovator, occasionally pointing out the “improvements” he had made. He singled out some of his novels as ...
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 |