Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions

Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions

Daniel Defoe, best known as the author of Robinson Crusoe, lived during a period of dramatic historical, political, and social change in Britain. Through his pamphlets, newspapers, books of travel, and works of fiction he commented on anything and everything, from birth control to the price of coal, from flying machines to academies for women, from security for the aged to the dangers of the plague.

In his fiction he created a type of vivid realism that powerfully influenced the development of the novel. The publication of works such as Robinson Crusoe are major events because they shape the ways in which we see our world, so that ever afterwards thoughts of desolation and desert islands immediately evoke Defoe`s masterpiece. From his 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stories, which he presented to his future wife under the sobriquet Bellmour, to his Compleat English Gentleman, left unpublished at his death, Defoe was pre-eminently a creator of fictions.

This work gives us a full understanding of the thought and personal experience that went into Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana.

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(University of California, Los Angeles, USA)

Inhaltsangabe

List of Illustrations
Abbreviations
Preface
1. After the Revolution
2. The education of a Dissenter
3. Meditation of matters spiritual and secular
4. Marriage and rebellion
5. Financial woes and recovery
6. Propagandist for William III
7. The True-Born Englishman and other satires
8. An age of plot and deceit
9. From pilloried libeller to Government propagandist
10. 'Writing history sheet by sheet': Defoe, The Review
11. From public journalist to lunar philosopher
12. Defoe as spy and Whig propagandist
13. A 'true spy' in Scotland
14. In limbo between causes and masters
15. Journalism and history in 'an age of mysteries and paradoxes'
16. How to sell out while keeping one's integrity (somewhat) intact in that 'Lunatick Age'
17. These dangerous times
18. 'A miserable divided nation'
19. A change of monarchs
20. Times when honest men must reserve themselves for better fortunes
21. Corrector general of the press
22. The year before Robinson Crusoe: intellectual controversies and experiments in fiction
23. Robinson Crusoe and the variability of life
24. After Crusoe: pirate adventures, military memoirs, and the South Sea scandal
25. Creating fictional worlds
26. Describing Britain in the 1720s
27. Enter Henry Baker
28. Last productive years
29. Sinking under the weight of affliction
Works cited
Index