This collection of moral essays is a semi-sequel toRobinson Crusoe.It may or may not have been written by Daniel Defoe, this original work's author.

"A Vindication of the Press" by Daniel Defoe is one of the writer's most characteristic pamphlets. Though this text does not seem to have been occasioned by a specific situation, and in it Defoe is not alone concerned with freedom of the press, but writes on a more general and discursive level. Defoe is a stark defender of the press's ability to exercise its work and his words helped bring its oppression to the forefront.

A highly conscious wordsmith, Daniel Defoe used expository styles in his fiction and non-fiction that reflected his ability to perceive material and intellectual phenomena from opposing, but not contradictory perspectives. Moreover, the boundaries of genre within his wide-ranging oeuvre can prove highly fluid. In this study, Robert James Merrett approaches Defoe's body of work using interdisciplinary methods that recognize dialectic in his verbal creativity and cognitive awareness. Examining more than ninety of Defoe's works, Merrett contends that this author's literariness exploits a conscious dialogue that fosters the reciprocity of traditional and progressive authorial procedures. Along the way, he discusses Defoe's lexical and semantic sensibility, his rhetorical and aesthetic theories, his contrarian theology, and more. Merrett proposes that Defoe's contrarian outlook celebrates a view of consciousness that acknowledges the brain's bipartite structure, and in so doing illustrates how cognitive science may be applied to further explorations of narrative art.

Daniel Defoe is known as the father of the English novel. This is the modern critical edition of Defoe's novels. It brings together all three parts of "Robinson Crusoe" and examines their relationship. The editorial material includes an introduction to each novel, explanatory endnotes, textual notes, and a consolidated index in volume 10.