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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... Dissenters). In them, he needs to address Whigs and Tories, Dissenters and Conformists, and he learns to do so in a variety of ways, including multiple points of view, a range of tones, and an adept blending of surveys of history ...
... Dissenters because no true Dissenter is an Occasional Conformist. He bluntly calls Occasional Conformity a sin, accuses those who practice it of “prostituting” their religion, and asks, “And how can you take it as a Civil Action in one ...
... Dissenters, to coincide with the House of Lords' debate on the Occasional Conformity Bill in December. It was ... Dissenters for the good of posterity and that the time was right; metaphors that described the Dissenters as butchers ...
... Dissenters, Would not be Inconsistent with the Act of Tolerance (1704) he contradicted his earlier statements by admitting that Dissenters had “publickly declar'd” that “Occasional Communion [is] Lawful in it self” and that there ...
... Dissenters) form a federation with considerable political and 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 ...
Contents
THE HISTORIES | |
THE HISTORICAL NOVELS | |
CRIME AND ADVENTURE | |
ROXANA | |
MELTED DOWN FILLED WITH WONDERS | |
NOTES | |
BIBLIOGRAPHY | |
INDEX | |