Defoe's Perpetual Seekers

Defoe's Perpetual Seekers PDF Author: Virginia Ogden Birdsall
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838750766
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
This study contends that the main characters in Defoe's six major fictions represent a more profound anxiety and cynicism regarding the human condition than has been generally recognized. From Robinson Crusoe to Roxana -- each is engaged in a lonely and futile search for identity and significance, and each pursues that goal with ruthless singlemindedness.

Defoe's Perpetual Seekers

Defoe's Perpetual Seekers PDF Author: Virginia Ogden Birdsall
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838750766
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
This study contends that the main characters in Defoe's six major fictions represent a more profound anxiety and cynicism regarding the human condition than has been generally recognized. From Robinson Crusoe to Roxana -- each is engaged in a lonely and futile search for identity and significance, and each pursues that goal with ruthless singlemindedness.

Moll Flanders

Moll Flanders PDF Author: Daniel Defoe
Publisher: Everyman's Library
ISBN: 0679405488
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
This is the spirited story of a survivor whose racy anecdotes and shady dealings only underline her essential warmth and goodness. But there is nothing sentimental about Moll, who presents herself warts and all. Though her adventures take her abroad, she remains the vivid creation of London. Moll Flanders, pickpocket and prostitute–a mercantile genius trading in the oldest human commodity–has been for the past three centuries an enduring representative of reckless vitality combined with unshakable inner virtue. Daniel Defoe manages his story with such skill that our affection for his heroine increases with each astonishing sin she commits. Moll’s adventures–possibly taken by Defoe from the story of some real criminal he met in Newgate, who “five times a wife, twelve year a thief, eight year a transported felon, at last grew rich, lived honest and died a penitent”–is told with the directness of narrative and reality of incident in which Defoe, often called the father of the novel, has never been equaled. (Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)

The Cambridge Companion to ‘Robinson Crusoe'

The Cambridge Companion to ‘Robinson Crusoe' PDF Author: John Richetti
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108634206
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
An instant success in its own time, Daniel Defoe's The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe has for three centuries drawn readers to its archetypal hero, the man surviving alone on an island. This Companion begins by studying the eighteenth-century literary, historical and cultural contexts of Defoe's novel, exploring the reasons for its immense popularity in Britain and in its colonies in America and in the wider European world. Chapters from leading scholars discuss the social, economic and political dimensions of Crusoe's island story before examining the 'after life' of Robinson Crusoe, from the book's multitudinous translations to its cultural migrations and transformations into other media such as film and television. By considering Defoe's seminal work from a variety of critical perspectives, this book provides a full understanding of the perennial fascination with, and the enduring legacy of, both the book and its iconic hero.

Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe PDF Author: Daniel Defoe
Publisher: Restless Books
ISBN: 1632061198
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Restless Classics presents the Three-Hundredth Anniversary Edition of Robinson Crusoe, the classic Caribbean adventure story and foundational English novel, with new illustrations by Eko and an introduction by Jamaica Kincaid that contextualizes the book for our globalized, postcolonial era. Three centuries after Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, this gripping tale of a castaway who spends thirty years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being ultimately rescued, remains a classic of the adventure genre and is widely considered the first great English novel. But the book also has much to teach us, in retrospect, about entrenched attitudes of colonizers toward the colonized that still resound today. As celebrated Caribbean writer Jamaica Kincaid writes in her bold new introduction, “The vivid, vibrant, subtle, important role of the tale of Robinson Crusoe, with his triumph of individual resilience and ingenuity wrapped up in his European, which is to say white, identity, has played in the long, uninterrupted literature of European conquest of the rest of the world must not be dismissed or ignored or silenced.”

Appositions of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas

Appositions of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas PDF Author: John Llewelyn
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253214935
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
"This is a book of scintillating intelligence, a book whose range of references, whose extraordinary ethical sensibility and linguistic creativity, set a standard for philosophy that few if any contemporary thinkers other than Derrida and Levinas themselves can match.... On every page, there is Llewelean sparkle." --David Wood If not simple opposition or simple juxtaposition, what is the relation between the writings to which Derrida and Levinas appose their signatures? What would each endorse in the writings of the other? What is it to sign and endorse? How does one assume responsibility, and how does one avoid assuming it? These are some of the probing questions that the prominent Continental philosopher John Llewelyn takes up in Appositions, which brings together and synthesizes 15 essays written during the past 20 years. This book by a powerfully original thinker and first-rate interpreter is essential reading for all those interested in the writings of Derrida and Levinas and in the ways in which their thinking intersects.

The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London

The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London PDF Author: Cynthia Wall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521630139
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
In September 1666 the Great Fire destroyed four-fifths of the ancient City of London within three days. All that had been familiar, settled, known, was suddenly and entirely swept away. Londoners faced an emptiness that was not only physical but also historical, social, financial and conceptual. The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London is the first study to situate the literature of Restoration and early Augustan England within the historical and cultural contexts of the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire. Cynthia Wall relates the marked topographical specificity of plays, poems and novels to a wider cultural network of responses to changing perceptions of urban space, and she shows how the literatures of the period - along with the surveying, mapping, rebuilding and official redescribing of the city - attempt to reinvest the city with comprehensible meaning and create new spaces for new genres.

In Proximity

In Proximity PDF Author: Melvyn New
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
ISBN: 9780896724518
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
In a world in which everything is reduced "to the play of signs detached from what is signified," Levinas asks a deceptively simple question: Whence, then, comes the urge to question injustice? By seeing the demand for justice for the other—the homeless, the destitute—as a return to morality, Levinas escapes the suspect finality of any ideology.Levinas’s question is one starting point for In Proximity, a collection of seventeen essays by scholars in eighteenth-century literature, philosophy, history, and religion, and their readings of Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, Wordsworth, Behn, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, Diderot, Laclos, and Mendelssohn. The title In Proximity alone speaks volumes about Levinas’s philosophy and its relevance today. "If it is true that we are, through technology, moving closer and closer to one another," writes editor Melvyn New, then "the importance of proximity and our response to it cannot be overstated." For the contributors to this volume, the question of whether we may, ethically, appropriate the object of study for our own causes has become vital. Levinas asks us to see ourselves, our own reading, "in proximity" to what is not ourselves, not our understanding of the world.The dialogue created among the essays themselves establishes an enormous diversity of texts and ideologies to which Levinas can contribute something of significant value. At a time when the secondary literature on Levinas and his work is expanding explosively, the cross-disciplinary voices gathered together in In Proximity come at precisely the right time.

The Complexion of Race

The Complexion of Race PDF Author: Roxann Wheeler
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812217223
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
In the 1723 Journal of a Voyage up the Gambia, an English narrator describes the native translators vital to the expedition's success as being "Black as Coal." Such a description of dark skin color was not unusual for eighteenth-century Britons--but neither was the statement that followed: "here, thro' Custom, (being Christians) they account themselves White Men." The Complexion of Race asks how such categories would have been possible, when and how such statements came to seem illogical, and how our understanding of the eighteenth century has been distorted by the imposition of nineteenth and twentieth century notions of race on an earlier period. Wheeler traces the emergence of skin color as a predominant marker of identity in British thought and juxtaposes the Enlightenment's scientific speculation on the biology of race with accounts in travel literature, fiction, and other documents that remain grounded in different models of human variety. As a consequence of a burgeoning empire in the second half of the eighteenth century, English writers were increasingly preoccupied with differentiating the British nation from its imperial outposts by naming traits that set off the rulers from the ruled; although race was one of these traits, it was by no means the distinguishing one. In the fiction of the time, non-European characters could still be "redeemed" by baptism or conversion and the British nation could embrace its mixed-race progeny. In Wheeler's eighteenth century we see the coexistence of two systems of racialization and to detect a moment when an older order, based on the division between Christian and heathen, gives way to a new one based on the assertion of difference between black and white.

Pauline Images in Fiction and Film

Pauline Images in Fiction and Film PDF Author: Larry Joseph Kreitzer
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9781850759331
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
This is Dr. Kreitzer's third study in the Biblical Seminar Series in which the connections between biblical texts, classic works of literature, and cinematic interpretations of those works of literature are explored. The aim is to illuminate both the New Testament texts and facets of contemporary culture through a cross-disciplinary approach. The studies discuss a wide variety of theological themes, including shipwreck and salvation, eschatology, eucharistic imagery, and liberation and slavery.

Imperial Characters

Imperial Characters PDF Author: Tara Ghoshal Wallace
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 0838757405
Category : British in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
"In a searching but sympathetic series of textual analyses, Wallace argues that the canon of eighteenth-century English Literature was bron out of the interplay between literary nationalism and an imperial internationalism. Imperial Characters will add considerably to the globalization of the discipline that has been underway for some years now."---Suvir Kaul, University of Pennsvlvania --