365 research outputs found
The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe (Ed. by N Seager)
No full textThe Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe is the most comprehensive overview available of the author's life, times, writings, and reception. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) is a major author in world literature, renowned for a succession of novels including Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and A Journal of the Plague Year, but more famous in his lifetime as a poet, journalist, and political agent. Across his vast oeuvre, which includes books, pamphlets, and periodicals, Defoe commented on virtually every development and issue of his lifetime, a turbulent and transformative period in British and global history. Defoe has proven challenging to position—in some respects he is a traditional and conservative thinker, but in other ways he is a progressive and innovative writer. He therefore benefits from the range of critical appraisals offered in this Handbook.The Handbook ranges from concerns of gender, class, and race to those of politics, religion, and economics. In accessible but learned chapters, contributors explore salient contexts in ways that show how they overlap and intersect, such as in chapters on science, environment, and empire. The Handbook provides both a thorough introduction to Defoe and to early eighteenth-century society, culture, and literature more broadly. Thirty-six chapters by leading literary scholars and historians explore the various genres in which Defoe wrote; the sociocultural contexts that inform his works; his writings on different locales, from the local to the global; and the posthumous reception and creative responses to his works
The Fortunate Mistress (Roxana) (Ed. by N Seager)
No full textLeft destitute by her husband, the heroine of Defoe's final novel has to choose between her virtue and her life. Choosing survival, she makes her way as a kept woman and courtesan. The Fortunate Mistress (1724), also known under the title Roxana, tells the story of how she climbs society's ladder by dint of her own enterprise, shedding and gaining multiple identities as she moves through the worlds of business and finance, and across the trade capitals of Europe. Amassing a fortune, her taste for men and luxuries veers increasingly to the aristocratic and exotic, culminating when she dances before the King at a masquerade dressed in the garb of a Turkish Sultana--at which point she is granted the name by which she is known to history, Roxana. Despite her rise, Roxana's past never recedes from view, and her choices eventally begin to weigh on her, prompting an excruciating self-reckoning that is only compounded as the children she has abandoned return, threatening to expose this past to public view. Defoe resists easy solutions in a sprawling and complex novel which shows an unprecedented degree of psychological realism: readers experience the interplay of circumstance, need, desire, religion, and social convention that can allow the development of a moral sense, or conspire to suppress it
Jane Austen, Lady Susan and Other Works (Ed. by N Seager)
No full textThis collection brings together Jane Austen’s earliest experiments in the art of fiction and novels that she left incomplete at the time of her premature death in 1817. Her fragmentary juvenilia show Austen developing her own sense of narrative form whilst parodying popular kinds of fiction of her day. Lady Susan is a wickedly funny epistolary novel about a captivating but unscrupulous widow seeking to snare husbands for her daughter and herself. The Watsons explores themes of family relationships, the marriage market, and attitudes to rank, which became the hallmarks of her major novels. In Sanditon, Austen exercises her acute powers of social observation in the setting of a newly fashionable seaside resort. These novels are here joined by shorter fictions that survive in Austen’s manuscripts, including critically acclaimed works like Catharine, Love and Friendship, and The History of England.Other Works include:Frederic and ElfridaJack and AliceEdgar and EmmaHenry and ElizaLove and FriendshipA History of EnglandThe Three SistersLesley CastleEvelynCatharine, or the BowerThe WatsonsSandito
Literary Evaluation and Authorship Attribution, or Defoe’s Politics at the Hanoverian Succession
No full textIn this essay, Nicholas Seager argues for re-attributing two pamphlets to Daniel Defoe: A Secret History of One Year (1714) and Memoirs of the Conduct of Her Late Majesty and Her Last Ministry (1715). These works, published shortly after the Hanoverian succession, were excluded from Defoe’s canon by Furbank and Owens on the grounds that the writing was poor in quality. A closer review of the external and internal evidence, however, points to Defoe as the author of these occasional political tracts, which reveal his attempts to attenuate what he perceived as the harmful effects of government by a single-party ministry
Style Substance And The Status Of The Defoe Canon FINAL
No full textThis article re-attributes to Daniel Defoe (c.1660–1731) one pamphlet and confirms his authorship of three works currently listed as ‘probable’ attributions, including one substantial book. More generally, it proposes refinements to authorship attribution methods with reference to Defoe’s widely disputed canon, a canon recognised as a special case which has implications for how we assign authorship of anonymous topical material from the late seventeenth and eighteenth century more generally. In particular, it contends that impressionistic evaluation should be discounted and that close parallels with securely ascribed works, sometimes amounting to direct self-borrowing, should be better recognised and given more evidentiary weight. The article presents new external evidence for its examples, which licenses a fuller assessment of internal features, namely style and substance. It reappraises the evidence for Defoe’s authorship of The Justice and Necessity of a War with Holland and The Present State of the Parties in Great Britain (both 1712) by attending to how their polemical strategies align to Defoe’s aims in other writings, and how the latter reproduces material Defoe used elsewhere. The article ends with a summary and assessment of changes to the Defoe canon since the publication of Furbank and Owens’s Critical Bibliography (1998), this amounting to six additions (two new and four re-attributions), five transferrals from ‘probable’ to ‘certain’ authorship, and one removal
The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe
No full textThe Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe is the most comprehensive overview available of the author’s life, times, writings, and reception. Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) is a major author in world literature, renowned for a succession of novels including Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and A Journal of the Plague Year, but more famous in his lifetime as a poet, journalist, and political agent. Across his vast oeuvre, which includes books, pamphlets, and periodicals, Defoe commented on virtually every development and issue of his lifetime, a turbulent and transformative period in British and global history. Defoe has proven challenging to position—in some respects he is a traditional and conservative thinker, but in other ways he is a progressive and innovative writer. He therefore benefits from the range of critical appraisals offered in this Handbook. The volume ranges from concerns of gender, class, and race to those of politics, religion, and economics. In accessible but learned chapters, expert contributors explore salient contexts in ways that show how they overlap and intersect, such as in chapters on science, environment, and empire. The Handbook provides both a thorough introduction to Defoe and to early eighteenth-century society, culture, and literature more broadly. Thirty-six chapters by leading literary scholars and historians explore the various genres in which Defoe wrote; the sociocultural contexts that inform his works; his writings on different locales, from the local to the global; and the posthumous reception and creative responses to his works
Introduction
No full textThe introduction recounts the life and writing career of Jonathan Swift, centred on his authorship of Gulliver’s Travels (1726). It provides an overview of the action of Swift’s masterpiece, placing the adventures of Lemuel Gulliver in parallel to the events of Swift’s life: his education, early career as secretary to William Temple, forays into satire, political writings during Anne’s reign, and Irish writings in the decade before he published Gulliver. The introduction establishes the circumstances of its publication, the different states of the text (and its paratexts), and some of the main critical attitudes to the work. It summarises the chapters within the volume
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