Defoe's America

Defoe's America PDF Author: Dennis Todd
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139488252
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
The Americas appear as an evocative setting in more than half of Daniel Defoe's novels, and often offer a new beginning for his characters. In the first full-length study of Defoe and colonialism, Dennis Todd explores why the New World loomed so large in Defoe's imagination. By focusing on the historical contexts that informed Defoe's depiction of American Indians, African slaves, and white indentured servants, Dennis Todd investigates the colonial assumptions that shaped his novels and, at the same time, uncovers how Defoe used details of the American experience in complex, often figurative ways to explore the psychological bases of the profound conversions and transformations that his heroes and heroines undergo. And by examining what Defoe knew and did not know about America, what he falsely believed and what he knowingly falsified, Defoe's America probes the doubts, hesitancies, and contradictions he had about the colonial project he so fervently promoted.

Defoe's America

Defoe's America PDF Author: Dennis Todd
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139488252
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
The Americas appear as an evocative setting in more than half of Daniel Defoe's novels, and often offer a new beginning for his characters. In the first full-length study of Defoe and colonialism, Dennis Todd explores why the New World loomed so large in Defoe's imagination. By focusing on the historical contexts that informed Defoe's depiction of American Indians, African slaves, and white indentured servants, Dennis Todd investigates the colonial assumptions that shaped his novels and, at the same time, uncovers how Defoe used details of the American experience in complex, often figurative ways to explore the psychological bases of the profound conversions and transformations that his heroes and heroines undergo. And by examining what Defoe knew and did not know about America, what he falsely believed and what he knowingly falsified, Defoe's America probes the doubts, hesitancies, and contradictions he had about the colonial project he so fervently promoted.

Defoe’s Major Fiction

Defoe’s Major Fiction PDF Author: Elizabeth R. Napier
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611496144
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
This book focuses on the pervasive concern with narrativity and self-construction that marks Defoe’s first-person fictional narratives. Defoe’s fictions focus obsessively and elaborately on the act of storytelling—not only in his creation of idiosyncratic voices preoccupied with the telling (and often the concealing) of their own life stories but also in his narrators’ repeated adversion to other, untold stories that compete for attention with their own. Defoe’s narratives raise profound questions about selfhood and agency (as well as demonstrate competing attitudes about narration) in his fictive worlds. His canon exhibits a broad range of first-person fictional accounts, from pseudo-memoir (A Journal of the Plague Year, Memoirs of a Cavalier) to criminal autobiography (Moll Flanders) to confession (Roxana), and the narrators of these accounts (secretive, compulsive, fractive) exhibit an array of resistances to the telling of their life stories. Such experiments with narration evince Defoe’s deep involvement in projects of self-description and -delineation, as he interrogates the boundaries of the self and dramatizes the arduousness of self-accounting. Defoe’s fictions are emphatically consciousness-centered and the significance of such a focus to the development of the novel is patently as great as is his “realistic” style. Defoe’s narrative project, in fact, challenges current views on the moment at which inwardness and interiority begin, as Lukács argued, to comprise the subject matter of the novel, implicitly attributing to identity and consciousness a place of signal and complex importance in the new genre.

Daniel Defoe in Context

Daniel Defoe in Context PDF Author: Albert J. Rivero
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108871925
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 723

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Book Description
Innovative in its structure and approach, Daniel Defoe in Context contains 42 essays by leading scholars illuminating the life, times, and world of Daniel Defoe. Defoe is one of the most important literary figures in English history, thanks not only to his pioneering novels Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, but also to his notable works in journalism, travel writing, conduct literature, and verse, both satiric and serious. Written with general readers and students in mind, the essays in this volume provide up-to-date knowledge about eighteenth-century literature, culture, and history in a high quality, clearly written, but completely accessible form. Together they demonstrate the ways not only in which Defoe's world shaped his writing, but also in which Defoe's writings profoundly affected his world, and therefore our world.

Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe PDF Author: Daniel Defoe
Publisher: 이새의나무
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Robinson Crusoe was presented as a true autobiography of a castaway marooned for 28 years on an uninhabited island. The book’s plot is believed to be based on the story of the real-life castaway Alexander Selkirk. And is first published on 25 April 1719. It was been considered one of the first English novels.

The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe

The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe PDF Author: Nicholas Seager
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198827172
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 721

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Book Description
The 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.

Daniel Defoe and the Representation of Personal Identity

Daniel Defoe and the Representation of Personal Identity PDF Author: Christopher Borsing
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317247620
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
The concept of a personal identity was a contentious issue in the early eighteenth century. John Locke’s philosophical discussion of personal identity in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding fostered a public debate upon the status of an immortal Christian soul. This book argues that Defoe, like many of this age, had religious difficulties with Locke’s empiricist analysis of human identity. In particular, it examines how Defoe explores competitive individualism as a social threat while also demonstrating the literary and psychological fiction of any concept of a separated, lone identity. This foreshadows Michel Foucault’s assertion that the idea of man is ‘a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge’. The monograph’s engagement with Defoe’s destabilization of any definition or image of personal identity across a wide range of genres – including satire, political propaganda, history, conduct literature, travel narrative, spiritual autobiography, piracy and history, economic and scientific literature, rogue biography, scandalous and secret history, dystopian documentary, science fiction and apparition narrative - is an important and original contribution to the literary and cultural understanding of the early eighteenth century as it interrogates and challenges modern presumptions of individual identity.

Defoe and the New Sciences

Defoe and the New Sciences PDF Author: Ilse Vickers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521024365
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This book describes the principles of Baconian science, and their influence on the thought and writing of Daniel Defoe.

The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Daniel Defoe

The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Daniel Defoe PDF Author: Daniel Defoe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009301969
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1018

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Book Description
This comprehensive and authoritative edition of the correspondence of Daniel Defoe situates each letter in its biographical, literary, and historical contexts. A unique source for a turbulent period of British history, Defoe's correspondence spans topics including the first age of party marked by Tory and Whig rivalry, religious tensions between the Church and Dissenters, the uncertainty of the monarchical succession, the birth of Great Britain and its establishment as a global empire, and the use of the press to mould public opinion. As well as an introduction discussing Defoe's epistolary habits and the distinctive features of his letters, headnotes and annotations explain each document's occasion, beginning in 1703 with Defoe hunted by the government for sedition, and ending in 1730 with him again in hiding, fleeing creditors months before his death. The volume is illustrated with examples of Defoe's letters, offering a fresh window onto Defoe's manuscript habits.

Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Other Narratives

Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Other Narratives PDF Author: Maximillian E. Novak
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611494869
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
This book explores significant problems in the fiction of Daniel Defoe. Maximillian E. Novak investigates a number of elements in Defoe’s work by probing his interest in rendering of reality (what Defoe called “the Thing itself”). Novak examines Defoe’s interest in the relationship between prose fiction and painting, as well as the various ways in which Defoe’s woks were read by contemporaries and by those novelists who attempted to imitate and comment upon his Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe decades after its publication. In this book, Novak attempts to consider the uniqueness and imaginativeness of various aspects of Defoe’s writings including his way of evoking the seeming inability of language to describe a vivid scene or moments of overwhelming emotion, his attraction to the fiction of islands and utopias, his gradual development of the concepts surrounding Crusoe’s cave, his fascination with the horrors of cannibalism, and some of the ways he attempted to defend his work and serious fiction in general. Most of all, Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Other Narratives establishes the complexity and originality of Defoe as a writer of fiction.

Defoe's Footprints

Defoe's Footprints PDF Author: Robert M. Maniquis
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802099211
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
In Defoe's Footprints, essays by prominent scholars of eighteenth-century literature salute Maximillian E. Novak's influence upon the study of Daniel Defoe. Best known today as the author of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe was a prolific writer in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries who wrote novels, essays, pamphlets, and poems. Widely extending Novak's perspectives, this volume explores Defoe's place in the English novel and in literary developments of mimesis, realism, and popular mythology. The contributors locate Defoe in new ways within the complex symbolism and discourse of a turbulent world of burgeoning capitalism, Protestantism, imperialism, and economic speculation. With attention to Defoe's neglected writings as well as to his important works, this volume uncovers his distance from and influence on modern literature, paying tribute to Maximillian E. Novak by presenting new ideas about, and new readings of, Daniel Defoe.