Observations on the principal cities, ports and geographical features, customs, manners, and inhabitants of early eighteenth-century Britain

Daniel Defoe led an exciting and indeed precarious life. A provocative pamphleteer and journalist, a spy and double agent, a revolutionary and a dreamer, he was variously hunted by mobs with murderous intent and treated as a celebrity by the most powerful leaders of the country. Imprisoned many times, pilloried and reviled by his enemies, through it all he managed to produce some of the most significant literature of the eighteenth century. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions is the first biography to view Defoe's complex life through the angle of vision that is most important to us as modern readers--his career as a writer. Maximillian Novak, a leading authority on Defoe, ranges from the writer's earliest collection of brief stories, which he presented to his future wife under the sobriquet Bellmour, to his Compleat English Gentleman, left unpublished at his death. Novak illuminates such works as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, novels that changed the course of fiction in their time and have remained towering classics to this day. And he reveals a writer who was a superb observer of his times--an age of dramatic historical, political, and social change. Indeed, through his many pamphlets, newspapers, books of travel, and works of fiction, Defoe commented on everything from birth control to the price of coal, and from flying machines to the dangers of the plague. Beautifully and authoritatively written, this is the first serious, full-scale biography of Defoe to appear in a decade. It gives us, for the first time, a full understanding of the thought and personal experience that lie behind some of the great works of English literature.

Daniel Defoe's life was packed with incident and drama. Born in the year of the Restoration of the Monarchy after the English Civil War, he remained a nonconformist throughout his life, actively rebelled against James II, travelled the country as a spy for King William and Queen Mary, worked in Scotland on active behalf of the historic Union of Scotland and England, helped launch the South Sea Company, was bankrupted frequently as a businessman, was imprisoned for libel and debt, and died a pauper.

This volume of interdisciplinary essays reflect current contributions to literary anthropology. Novel Approaches to Anthropology: Contributions to Literary Anthropology showcases the myriad ways that anthropologists bring their disciplinary perspectives, theories, concepts, and pedagogical strategies to interpreting fiction and travel writing written in the past and present. The authors integrate insights from the reflexive deconstructive turn in anthropology and from critical Marxist and feminist approaches that ground interpretation in the political, economic, and social constraints and experiences of everyday life. The contributors share the view that fiction, like all artistic expression, is rooted in specific historical and cultural contexts. Literature, like all artistic expression, stimulates a critical imagination by allowing readers to take a fresh look at their own society and culture.

Defoe's fictional settings all begin in the reign of the Stuarts, but the lack of specificity invariably reflects on the Hanoverian political and social situation, which witnessed a crisis in Whig leadership from 1717 to Walpole's resumption of power after the disaster of the South Sea Bubble and the sudden deaths of Stanhope and Sunderland. This serious split in Whig leadership probably played a role in Defoe's turning toward fiction. But Defoe never abandoned his social and political views. This study explores how his social viewpoint actuates his major fiction. --

Daniel Defoe was one of the most important and best-known writers of the eighteenth century but there is a feeling among scholars that the Defoe 'canon' is a remarkably strange and not very satisfactory construction. Between 1790, when the first bibliography of Defoe appeared, and 1971, when J.R. Moore published the second edition of his Checklist, the canon had swollen from just over a hundred items to 570. A large proportion of these attributions had been made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on the basis of features of style, 'favourite phrases' and resemblance to Defoe's known views. This book is a list of all the items in Moore's Checklist (the current authority on the Defoe canon) that at present the authors consider questionable with in each case a note as to who was the first attributer, a brief synopsis and an explanation of the reasons for doubting the ascription.

This book considers why narrative realism in literature is seen as a 'full account' of 'real life' and the individual self. Unconventionally, Carnell shows that the formal conventions of narrative realism emerged in the seventeenth century in response to an explosion of partisan writings that put into play competing versions of political selfhood.