Daniel Defoe : master of fictions : his life and ideas
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stories, which he presented to his future wife under the sobriquet Bellmour, to his Compleat English Gentleman, left unpublished at his death.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
Biography
xi, 756 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780198126867, 9780199261543, 0198126867, 0199261547
46693938
Introduction
After the Revolution
Education of a dissenter
Meditating on matters spiritual and secular
Marriage and rebellion
Financial woes and recovery
Propagandist for William III
True-born Englishman and other satires
Age of plot and deceit, of contradiction and paradox
From pilloried libeller to government propagandist
Writing history sheet by sheet : Defoe, The review, and The storm
From public journalist to lunar philosopher
Defoe as spy and Whig propagandist
True spy in Scotland
In limbo between causes and masters
Journalism and history in an age of mysteries and paradoxes
How to sell out while keeping one's integrity (somewhat) intact in that lunatick age
These dangerous times : or wild doings in this world
Miserable divided nation
Change of monarchs and the Whig's revenge
Times when honest men must reserve themselves for better fortunes
Corrector general of the press : a digression on Defoe as a journalist
Year before Robinson Crusoe : intellectual controversies and experiments in fiction
Robinson Crusoe and the variability of life
After Crusoe : pirate adventures, military memoirs and the South Sea scandal
Creating fictional worlds
Describing Britain in the 1720s
Enter Henry Baker
Last productive years
Sinking under the weight of affliction