Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions : His Life and IdeasDaniel Defoe, best known as the author of Robinson Crusoe, lived during a period of dramatic historical, political, and social change in Britain, and was by any standard a superb observer of his times. Through his pamphlets, newspapers, books of travel, and works of fiction he commented onanything 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 workssuch 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. We should not be surprised: Defoe always wrote to make things happen. During his career as anauthor, he was a provocative pamphleteer, journalist, and poet; but when he was not writing, he was, at times, a spy and a 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 four times or more, pilloried and reviled by his enemies, through it all he never lost confidence in his ability as a writer and thinker. 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. 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stories, which he presented to his future wife under the sobriquet Bellmour,to his Compleat English Gentleman, left unpublished at his death, Defoe was pre-eminently a creator of fictions.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 life gives us, for the first time, a full understanding of the thought and personal experience that went into such great works as Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana. |
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... Jacobite tract in the second half of the eighteenth century with a portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie as a frontispiece.3 Both his life and his writings lend themselves to what seems to be limitless interpretation and misinterpretation ...
... Jacobite tract in the second half of the eighteenth century with a portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie as a frontispiece.3 Both his life and his writings lend themselves to what seems to be limitless interpretation and misinterpretation ...
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... Jacobitism , that he might well experience the same fate as Defoe : A Gentleman well known for his works in Verse and ... Jacobite pamphlets and had to be protected by the Queen's pardon was almost all that had survived of his reputation ...
... Jacobitism , that he might well experience the same fate as Defoe : A Gentleman well known for his works in Verse and ... Jacobite pamphlets and had to be protected by the Queen's pardon was almost all that had survived of his reputation ...
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Contents
After the Revolution | 11 |
The Education of a Dissenter | 32 |
Meditating on Matters Spiritual and Secular | 51 |
Marriage and Rebellion | 73 |
Financial Woes and Recovery | 101 |
Propagandist for William III | 120 |
The TrueBorn Englishman and Other Satires | 142 |
An Age of Plot and Deceit of Contradiction and Paradox | 168 |
These Dangerous Times Or Wild Doings in This World | 386 |
A Miserable Divided Nation | 411 |
A Change of Monarchs and the Whigs Revenge | 436 |
Times When Honest Men Must Reserve Themselves for Better Fortunes | 464 |
Corrector General of the Press A Digression on Defoe as a Journalist | 490 |
The Year Before Robinson Crusoe Intellectual Controversies and Experiments in Fiction | 513 |
Robinson Crusoe and the Variability of Life | 535 |
After Crusoe Pirate Adventures Military Memoirs and the South Sea Scandal | 565 |
From Pilloried Libeller to Government Propagandist | 189 |
Writing History Sheet by Sheet Defoe The Review and The Storm | 213 |
From Public Journalist to Lunar Philosopher | 237 |
Defoe as Spy and Whig Propagandist | 262 |
A True Spy in Scotland | 289 |
In Limbo Between Causes and Masters | 313 |
Journalism and History in An Age of Mysteries and Paradoxes | 338 |
How to Sell Out While Keeping Ones Integrity Somewhat Intact in That Lunatick Age | 360 |
Creating Fictional Worlds | 593 |
Describing Britain in the 1720s | 624 |
Enter Henry Baker | 648 |
Last Productive Years | 674 |
Sinking Under the Weight of Affliction | 695 |
707 | |
741 | |
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