Search results for ""Author Daniel Defoe"

The Life of Daniel Defoe examines the entire range of Defoe’s writing in the context of what is known about his life and opinions. Features extended and detailed commentaries on Defoe’s political, religious, moral, and economic journalism, as well as on all of his narrative fictions, including Robinson Crusoe Places emphasis on Defoe’s distinctive style and rhetoric Situates his work within the precise historical circumstances of the eighteenth-century in which Defoe was an important and active participant Now available in paperback

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The Life of Daniel Defoe examines the entire range of Defoe’s writing in the context of what is known about his life and opinions. Features extended and detailed commentaries on Defoe’s political, religious, moral, and economic journalism, as well as on all of his narrative fictions, including Robinson Crusoe Places emphasis on Defoe’s distinctive style and rhetoric Situates his work within the precise historical circumstances of the eighteenth-century in which Defoe was an important and active participant Now available in paperback

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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.

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Daniel Defoe's work displays a keen interest in stories of supernatural encounters. Once considering how one might prove supernatural occurrences and whether one can trust eyewitness accounts, Defoe demonstrates that more is at stake. Like his contemporaries, Defoe wonders about the range of scientific insight, and about the moral and epistemological ramifications of unchallenged trust and faith. His transformations of the supernatural probe the boundaries of knowledge and evidence and play with the limits of cognition, emphasizing the inseparability of mind and emotion.

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'A bold anthology ... alive with provocations and insights' John Carey, Sunday Times'The Boy-scouts mistook my signal, and have killed the postman. I've had very little practice in this sort of thing, you see'The British short story tradition is probably the richest, most varied and historically extensive in the world. This new anthology celebrates the full diversity and energy of its writers, subjects and tones, from the story's origins with Defoe, Swift and Fielding, to the 'golden age' of the fin de siècle and Edwardian period, ending with the First World War. Including the most famous authors as well as some magnificent, little-known stories never republished since their first appearance in magazines and periodicals, these stories are by turns topical and playful, ghostly and theatrical, rumbustious and sublime.Edited with an introduction by Philip Hensher

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Daniel Defoe’s Incredible Train Journey describes the odyssey undertaken by two eccentric pensioners as they travel on every mile of railway track in the UK. Surreal and poignant by turns, Stuart Campbell describes the people they meet and the unwanted adventures that befall them. He is aided and abetted by the ghost of Daniel Defoe, writer, soldier, businessman and spy who completed his own journey in the 1720s.

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The book focuses on the use of confessional mode in Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders and Ihara Saikaku's The Life of an Amorous Woman, two works of fiction, which, although written in two different cultural contexts, bear a number of narrative similarities. Both works attempt to create trustworthy narrators and use realistic techniques of depiction while focusing on details and enumerating tangible objects. Both describe vividly and colourfully the milieu and the characters while embracing the contradictions of life and personality. Finally, both use a mode of confession, displaying 'what occurs in the individual mind under the impact of the temporal flux,' which is a principle characteristic of the modern novel (Watt 22).The author delineates the development of narrative fiction in Japan and England (Chapter I), analyses the role of confession (or revelation) in the literary and cultural traditions of the two countries (Chapter II&III), and considers various intricacies of using confession as a narrative strategy in fiction (Chapter IV). The revelation of the narrators' past is accompanied by their conscious concealment of various details and by means of withholding certain information they succeed in attracting the attention of the audience and preparing a suitable setting for disclosure. Moreover, although Moll Flanders and the Amorous Woman, both experienced and advanced in years, yet sometimes showing naivety and ignorance characteristic of their childhood and youth, speak from the distance of time and place, they are entirely absorbed in their stories, frequently using the praesens historicum to emphasise the immediacy of what they narrate. The terms "novel" and "confession" are used in the book as broad categories, which enable – although not without reservations – a comparative reading of two works coming from two different backgrounds. The attempts to define the labels in the literary, historical and biographical contexts bring to the forefront not only the narrative traditions in England and Japan but also the present-day understanding of what the modern novel is.

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After the Glorious Revolution, a not so glorious age of lawlessness befell England. Crime ran rampant, and highwaymen, thieves, and prostitutes ruled the land. Execution by hanging often punished the smallest infractions, and rip-roaring stories of fearless criminals proliferated, giving birth to a new medium: the newspaper. In 1724, housebreaker Jack Sheppard—a "pocket Hercules," his small frame packed with muscle—finally met the hangman. Street singers sang ballads about the Cockney burglar because no prison could hold him. Each more astonishing than the last, his final jailbreak took him through six successive locked rooms, after which he shimmied down two blankets from the prison roof to the street below. Just before Sheppard swung, he gave an account of his life to a writer in the crowd. Daniel Defoe stood in the shadow of the day's literati—Swift, Pope, Gay—and had done hard time himself for sedition and bankruptcy. He saw how prison corrupted the poor. They came out thieves, but he came out a journalist. Six months later, the author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders covered another death at the hanging tree. Jonathan Wild looked every bit the brute—body covered in scars from dagger, sword, and gun, bald head patched with silver plates from a fractured skull—and he had all but invented the double-cross. He cultivated young thieves, profited from their work, then turned them in for his reward—and their execution. But one man refused to play his game. Sheppard didn't take orders from this self-proclaimed "thief-taker general," nor would he hawk his loot through Wild's fences. The two-faced bounty hunter took it personally and helped bring the young burglar's life to an end. But when Wild's charade came to light, he quickly became the most despised man in the land. When he was hanged for his own crimes, the mob wasn't rooting for Wild as it had for Sheppard. Instead, they hurled stones, rotten food, and even dead animals at him. Defoe once again got the scoop, and tabloid journalism as we know it had begun.

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This is the story of a most ingenious invention: the novel. Desribed for the first time in The Rise of The Novel, Ian Watt's landmark classic reveals the origins and explains the success of the most popular literary form of all time.In the space of a single generation, three eighteenth-century writers -- Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding -- invented an entirely new genre of writing: the novel. With penetrating and original readings of their works, as well as those of Jane Austen, who further developed and popularised it, he explains why these authors wrote in the way that they did, and how the complex changes in society – the emergence of the middle-class and the new social position of women – gave rise to its success. Heralded as a revelation when it first appeared, The Rise of The Novel remains one of the most widely read and enjoyable books of literary criticism ever written, capturing precisely and satisfyingly what it is about the form that so enthrals us.

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Falling into Matter examines the complex role of the body in the development of the English novel in the eighteenth century. Elizabeth R. Napier argues that despite an increasing emphasis on the need to present ideas in corporeal terms, early fiction writers continued to register spiritual and moral reservations about the centrality of the body to human and imaginative experience. Drawing on six works of early English fiction - Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - Napier examines how authors grappled with technical and philosophical issues of the body, questioning its capacity for moral action, its relationship to individual freedom and dignity, and its role in the creation of art. Falling into Matter charts the course of the early novel as its authors engaged formally, stylistically, and thematically with the increasingly insistent role of the body in the new genre.

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Written by one of the world’s leading literary theorists, this book provides a wide-ranging, accessible and humorous introduction to the English novel from Daniel Defoe to the present day. Covers the works of major authors, including Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, the Brontës, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce. Distils the essentials of the theory of the novel. Follows the model of Eagleton’s hugely popular Literary Theory: An Introduction (Second Edition, 1996).

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Daniel Defoe's bawdy tale of a woman's struggle for independence and redemption, Moll Flanders is edited with an introduction and notes by David Blewett in Penguin Classics.Born in Newgate prison and abandoned six months later, Moll Flanders' drive to find and hold on to a secure place in society propels her through incest, adultery, bigamy, prostitution and a resourceful career as a thief ('the greatest Artist of my time') before her crimes catche up with her, and she is transported to the colony of Virginia in the New World. If Moll Flanders is on one level a Puritan's tale of sin and repentance, through self-made, self-reliant Moll, Daniel Defoe's rich subtext conveys all the paradoxes and amoralities of the struggle for property and power in the newly individualistic society of Eighteenth-century England.Based on the first edition of 1722, this volume includes a chronology, suggestions for further reading, notes on currency and maps of London and Virginia in the late seventeenth century.Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) had a variety of careers including merchant, soldier, spy, and political pamphleteer. Over the course of his life Daniel Defoe wrote over two hundred and fifty books on economics, history, biography and crime, but is best remembered for the fiction he produced in late life, which includes Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724). Defoe had a great influence on the development of the English novel and many consider him to be the first true novelist.If you enjoyed Moll Flanders, you might like Samuel Richardson's Pamela, also available in Penguin Classics.

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Who has not dreamed of life on an exotic isle, far away from civilization? Here is the novel which has inspired countless imitations by lesser writers, none of which equal the power and originality of Defoe's famous book. Robinson Crusoe, set ashore on an island after a terrible storm at sea, is forced to make do with only a knife, some tobacco, and a pipe. He learns how to build a canoe, make bread, and endure endless solitude. That is, until, twenty-four years later, when he confronts another human being. First published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe has been praised by such writers as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Johnson as one of the greatest novels in the English language. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) trained for the ministry, became a political journalist, and finally, to many, became "the father of the English novel." He is also the author of Moll Flanders.

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Captain Thomas Bowrey gained renown in numerous fields. He would publish the first ever Malay-English dictionary; he was involved in the African slave trade to India and he collaborated with Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, in the founding of the South Sea Company.

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A fascinating collection of essays on literary subjects ranging from Daniel Defoe to Samuel Beckett by a Nobel and Booker Prize-winning writerLate Essays gathers together J.M. Coetzee’s literary essays from 2006 to 2017. The subjects covered in this stunning collection range from Daniel Defoe in the early eighteenth century to Coetzee’s contemporary Philip Roth. Coetzee has had a long-standing interest in German literature and here he engages with the work of Goethe, Hölderlin, Kleist and Walser. There are four fascinating essays on fellow Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett and he looks at the work of three Australian writers: Patrick White, Les Murray and Gerald Murnane. There are essays too on Tolstoy’s great novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, on Flaubert’s masterpiece Madame Bovary, and on the Argentine modernist Antonio Di Benedetto.

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David Womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of Literature at the University of Oxford. Among his interests are Jonathan Swift (he was the general editor of the CUP edition of Swift), Daniel Defoe and Edward Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire he edited for Penguin Classics.

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Warrior, prince, lover and rogue: there is much to be said for the Essex man. Henry VIII, Daniel Defoe and Wat Tyler are all covered along with many more in this exciting exploration of Essex Boys. Pepys and Dickens captured Essex in words, while the heads of great Essex families administered its laws and kept the county in order. Men of Essex have battled Viking marauders, defied Norman warlords, sailed with ‘hearts of oak’ against the Spanish Armada and vanquished Napoleon on both land and sea. A man of music, science and literature, the Essex Boy will always be a man of many guises. Strong and loyal, passionate and ruthless – he is here in the pages of this book. Augustine Courtauld, Byrhtnoth, Charles Dickens, The Coggeshall Gang, Colchester Jack, Daniel Defoe, Daniel London, Daniel Mendoza, Dick Turpin, Eudo Dapifer, The Lords Rich, Henry VII, Henry VIII, Humphry Repton, The Ingrave Scribes, John Ardley, John Pell, Captain Oates, Myles Graye, Philip Sainty, Prince Albert Edward, Richard Parker, Sir John Hawkwood, Nathaniel Hedge, William Hunter

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'The most reliable and comprehensive account of the Great Plague that we possess' Anthony Burgess In 1665 the plague swept through London, claiming over 97,000 lives. Daniel Defoe was just five at the time of the plague, but he later called on his own memories, as well as his writing experience, to create this vivid chronicle of the epidemic and its victims. 'A Journal' (1722) follows Defoe's fictional narrator as he traces the devastating progress of the plague through the streets of London. Here we see a city transformed: some of its streets suspiciously empty, some - with crosses on their doors - overwhelmingly full of the sounds and smells of human suffering. And every living citizen he meets has a horrifying story that demands to be heard.

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Britain in the early eighteenth century: an introduction that is both informative and imaginative, reliable and entertaining. To the tradition of travel writing Daniel Defoe brings a lifetime's experience as a businessman, soldier, economic journalist and spy, and his Tour (1724-6) is an invaluable source of social and economic history. But this book is far more than a beautifully written guide to Britain just before the industrial revolution, for Defoe possessed a wild, inventive streak that endows his work with astonishing energy and tension, and the Tour is his deeply imaginative response to a brave new economic world. By employing his skills as a chronicler, a polemicist and a creative writer keenly sensitive to the depredations of time, Defoe more than achieves his aim of rendering 'the present state' of Britain.

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A revolution in clock technology in England during the 1660s allowed people to measure time more accurately, attend to it more minutely, and possess it more privately than previously imaginable. In this text, Stuart Sherman argues that innovations in prose emerged simultaneously with this technological breakthrough, enabling authors to recount the new kind of time by which England was learning to live and work. Through readings of Samuel Pepys's diary, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's daily "Spectator", the travel writings of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell and the novels of Daniel Defoe and Frances Burney, Sherman traces the development of a new way of counting time in prose - the diurnal structure of consecutively dated installments - within the cultural context of the daily institutions that gave it form and motion.

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This beautifully illustrated anthology is a indispensable collection of extracts from well-loved children’s books. Featuring fiction from Daniel Defoe, Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling as well as quality non-fiction. You can use the texts as a springboard for your own teaching ideas or with Teacher’s Guide 5 for a complete English programme. Treasure House Anthology 5 will inspire a love of reading.• Classic texts showcase our rich and varied literary heritage.• Fiction from leading contemporary authors captures the imagination.• A wide variety of poetry promotes wonder and joy.• High quality non-fiction engages and informs curious young minds.Use with Treasure House Teacher’s Guide 5 for a complete English programme.

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Originally written to entertain his four young sons, Johann David Wyss based The Swiss Family Robinson on Daniel Defoe's classic shipwreck story, Robinson Crusoe (1719). Upon its initial publication in 1812, The Swiss Family Robinson was received with great enthusiasm not only as a first-rate adventure story, but also as a practical guide to self-sufficiency.

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Penguin presents the audio CD edition of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. After surviving a terrible shipwreck, Robinson Crusoe discovers he is the only human on an island far from any shipping routes or rescue. At first he is devastated, but slowly, with patience and imagination, he transforms his dismal island into a tropical paradise. For twenty-four years he lives with no human companionship - until one fateful day, when he discovers he is not alone...Lightly abridged for Puffin Classics.

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Following the success of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe wrote a new fiction, the story of an English pirate whose success eclipsed every buccaneer the Atlantic world had seen. Featuring a haunted, unreliable narrator, a daring trek across the continent of Africa, and mercantile adventures in the China Seas, Captain Singleton is a tale of loneliness, brotherhood, and the lust for profit.Appendices to this Broadview Edition include materials on pirate writing, travel writing, and earlier pirate tales that may have provided models for Captain Singleton.

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In 1698 Celia Fiennes an intrepid traveler and relative of the Boscawen family rode into Truro on horseback and immediately loved it although she described it in her diary as 'a ruinated and disregarded place, formerly a great tradeing town'. In 1724 the author Daniel Defoe found Truro 'sadly declining as a port' and doubted whether it would ever recover so the fortunes of the town changed just as the inhabitants, buildings and roads altered over the years. In this book we see photographs that evoke memories of the Truro that once was and we can compare them with Truro today. Change is constantly with us and yet the heart of this graceful city remains little changed. Boscawen Street, Cathedral Lane, Georgian Lemon Street and our rivers are instantly recognisable and mean 'home' to Truronians wherever they may be.

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"Literature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture, 1660-1780" chronicles changes in contentious politics and religion and their varied representations in British letters from the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. An uncertain trend toward tolerance and away from painful discord significantly influenced authors who reflected on and enhanced germane aspects of British literary and intellectual life. The movement was stymied during the painful Gordon Riots in June 1780, from which Britain needed to repair itself. Howard D. Weinbrot's broad-ranging interdisciplinary study considers sermons, satire, political and religious polemic, Anglo-French relations, biblical and theological commentary, Methodism, legal history, and the novel. "Literature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture, 1660-1780" analyzes the texts and contexts of several major and minor authors, including Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Olaudah Equiano, Maria De Fleury, Lord George Gordon, Nathaniel Lancaster, Henry Sacheverell, Tobias Smollett, and Edward Synge.

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Nobel Laureate and two-time Booker prize-winning author of Disgrace and The Life and Times of Michael K, J. M. Coetzee reimagines Daniel DeFoe's classic novel Robinson Crusoe in Foe. Published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. In an act of breathtaking imagination, J.M Coetzee radically reinvents the story of Robinson Crusoe.In the early eighteenth century, Susan Barton finds herself adrift from a mutinous ship and cast ashore on a remote desert island. There she finds shelter with its only other inhabitants: a man named Cruso and his tongueless slave, Friday. In time, she builds a life for herself as Cruso's companion and, eventually, his lover. At last they are rescued by a passing ship, but only she and Friday survive the journey back to London.Determined to have her story told, she pursues the eminent man of letters Daniel Foe in the hope that he will relate truthfully her memories to the world. But with Cruso dead, Friday incapable of speech and Foe himself intent on reshaping her narrative, Barton struggles to maintain her grip on the past, only to fall victim to the seduction of storytelling itself.Treacherous, elegant and unexpectedly moving, Foe remains one of the most exquisitely composed of this pre-eminent author's works.'A small miracle of a book. . . of marvellous intricacy and overwhelming power' Washington Post'A superb novel' The New York Times

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This tale of intrigue and betrayal goes to the heart of events surrounding the Treaty of Union in 1707. Daniel Foe (better known as Defoe), sent to Scotland to sway opinion towards Union, reports to his English spymaster. But Edinburgh is already a hotbed of counter-plots and nascent rebellion. Foe's encounters with a landlady who is not what she seems, and with a beautiful Jacobite agent, lead him to become a novelist, against his better instincts.

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Mind, Body, Motion, Matter investigates the relationship between the eighteenth century's two predominant approaches to the natural world - mechanistic materialism and vitalism - in the works of leading British and French writers such as Daniel Defoe, William Hogarth, Laurence Sterne, the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Denis Diderot. Focusing on embodied experience and the materialization of thought in poetry, novels, art, and religion, the literary scholars in this collection offer new and intriguing readings of these canonical authors. Informed by contemporary currents such as new materialism, cognitive studies, media theory, and post-secularism, their essays demonstrate the volatility of the core ideas opened up by materialism and the possibilities of an aesthetic vitalism of form.

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Nobel Laureate and two-time Booker prize-winning author of Disgrace and The Life and Times of Michael K, J. M. Coetzee reimagines Daniel DeFoe's classic novel Robinson Crusoe in Foe. In an act of breathtaking imagination, J.M Coetzee radically reinvents the story of Robinson Crusoe.In the early eighteenth century, Susan Barton finds herself adrift from a mutinous ship and cast ashore on a remote desert island. There she finds shelter with its only other inhabitants: a man named Cruso and his tongueless slave, Friday. In time, she builds a life for herself as Cruso's companion and, eventually, his lover. At last they are rescued by a passing ship, but only she and Friday survive the journey back to London.Determined to have her story told, she pursues the eminent man of letters Daniel Foe in the hope that he will relate truthfully her memories to the world. But with Cruso dead, Friday incapable of speech and Foe himself intent on reshaping her narrative, Barton struggles to maintain her grip on the past, only to fall victim to the seduction of storytelling itself.Treacherous, elegant and unexpectedly moving, Foe remains one of the most exquisitely composed of this pre-eminent author's works.'A small miracle of a book. . . of marvellous intricacy and overwhelming power' Washington Post'A superb novel' The New York TimesSouth African author J. M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice for his novels Disgrace and The Life and Times of Michael K. His novel set during the South African apartheid, Age of Iron, winner of the Sunday Express Book of the Year award is also available in Penguin paperback.

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Long dismissed by critics as a novel of merely historical interest, Colonel Jack is one of Daniel Defoe’s most entertaining, revealing, and complex works. It is the supposed autobiography of an English gentleman who begins life as a child of the London streets. He and his brothers are brought up as pickpockets and highwaymen, but Jack seeks to improve himself. Kidnapped and taken to America, he becomes first a slave, then an overseer on plantations in Maryland. Jack’s story is one of dramatic turns of fortune that ultimately lead to a life of law-abiding prosperity as a plantation owner.Historical appendices relate to eighteenth-century Virginia and Maryland and to contemporary crime, punishment, and imprisonment.

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'Robinson Crusoe has a universal appeal, a story that goes right to the core of existence' Simon ArmitageDaniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, regarded by many to be first novel in English, is also the original tale of a castaway struggling to survive on a remote desert island. The sole survivor of a shipwreck, Robinson Crusoe is washed up on a desert island. In his journal he chronicles his daily battle to stay alive, as he conquers isolation, fashions shelter and clothes, enlists the help of a native islander who he names 'Friday', and fights off cannibals and mutineers. Written in an age of exploration and enterprise, it has been variously interpreted as an embodiment of British imperialist values, as a portrayal of 'natural man', or as a moral fable. But above all is a brilliant narrative, depicting Crusoe's transformation from terrified survivor to self-sufficient master of an island. This edition contains a full chronology of Defoe's life and times, explanatory notes, glossary and a critical introduction discussing Robinson Crusoe as a pioneering work of modern psychological realism.Edited with an introduction and notes by John Richetti.

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The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Britain saw the proposal of so many endeavors called "projects"—a catchphrase for the daring, sometimes dangerous practice of shaping the future—that Daniel Defoe dubbed his era a "Projecting Age." These ideas spanned a wide variety of scientific, technological, and intellectual interventions intended for the betterment of England. But for all the fanfare surrounding them, few such schemes actually materialized, leaving scores of defunct visions, from Defoe's own attempt to farm cats for perfume, to Mary Astell's proposal to charter a college for women, to countless ventures for improving land, streamlining government, and inventing new consumer goods. Taken together, these failed plans form a compelling alternative history of a Britain that might have been. The Wreckage of Intentions offers a comprehensive and critical account of projects, exploring the historical memory surrounding these concrete yet incomplete efforts to advance British society during a period defined by revolutions in finance and agriculture, the rise of experimental science, and the establishment of constitutional monarchy. Using methods of literary analysis, David Alff shows how projects began as written proposals, circulated as print objects, spurred physical undertakings, and provoked responses in the realms of poetry, fiction, and drama. Mapping this process discloses the ways in which eighteenth-century authors applied their faculties of imagination to achieve finite goals and, in so doing, devised new ways of seeing the world through its future potential. Approaching old projects through the language, landscapes, data, and personas they left behind, Alff contends this vision was, and remains, vital to the functions of statecraft, commerce, science, religion, and literature.

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Prompted by commercial and imperial expansion such as the creation of the Bank of England in 1694 and the publication and circulation of Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News in 1626, rapidly changing cultural, economic, and political realities in early modern England generated a paradigmatic shift in class awareness. Denys Van Renen’s The Other Exchange demonstrates how middle-class consciousness not only emerged in opposition to the lived and perceived abuses of the aristocratic elite but also was fostered by the economic and sociocultural influence of women and lower-class urban communities. Van Renen contends that, fascinated by the intellectual and cultural vibrancy of the urban underclass, many major authors and playwrights in the early modern era—Ben Jonson, Richard Brome, Aphra Behn, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Eliza Haywood, and Daniel Defoe—featured lower-class men and women and other marginalized groups in their work as a response to the shifting political and social terrain of the day. Van Renen illuminates this fascination with marginalized groups as a key element in the development of a middle-class mindset.

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On the north end of Londonliesan old nonconformistburial ground named Bunhill Fields. Bunhill becamethefinal resting place for some of the most honored names of English Protestantism. Burialoutside the city walls symbolized that thoseinterredat Bunhill lived and died outside the English body politic.Bunhill, its location declares,isthe properhome for undomesticateddissenters. Amongmore than 120,000 graves, three monuments stand in the central courtyard: one for John Bunyan (1628â1688), a second for Daniel Defoe (1660?â1731), and a third for William Blake (1757â1827). Undomesticated Dissent asks, "why these three monuments?" The answer, as Curtis Freeman leads readers to discover, is anidea as vitalandtransformative for public life today as itwasunsettling and revolutionary then. To telltheuntoldtaleof the Bunhill graves,Freeman focuseson the three classic texts by Bunyan, Defoe, and Blakeâ The Pilgrim's Progress , Robinson Crusoe , and Jerusalem âas testaments of dissent. Their enduring literary power, as Freeman shows,derives from theiroriginal political and religious contexts.But Freeman also traces theabidingpropheticinfluenceof these texts,revealingthe confluence of great literature and principled religiousnonconformityin the checkered story of democraticpoliticalarrangements. Undomesticated Dissent provides a sweeping intellectual history of the public virtue of religiously motivated dissent from the seventeenth century to the present, by carefully comparing, contrasting, and then weighing the various types of dissentâevangelicaland spiritual dissent (Bunyan), economic and social dissent (Defoe),radical andapocalyptic dissent (Blake). Freemanoffersdissentingimaginationasagenerative source for democracy, as well as a force forresistancetothe coercivepowers of domestication.By placing Bunyan, Defoe, and Blake within an extended argument about the nature and ends of democracy, Undomesticated Dissent reveals howthese three mentransmittedtheirdemocratic ideas across the globe,hidden within the text of their stories. Freemanconcludes thatdissent, so crucial to the establishing of democracy, remainsequally essential for its flourishing. Buried deep intheirfull narrative of religion and resistance, the three monuments at Bunhill together declare that dissent is not disloyalty, and that democracy depends on dissent.

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What do literary texts tell us about growing old? The essays in this volume introduce and explore representations of ageing and old age in canonical works of English and postcolonial literature. The contributors examine texts by William Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, Julian Barnes, Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, J.M. Coetzee, Alice Munro, Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace and, together with a medical study, they suggest solutions to the challenges arising from the current demographic change brought about by ageing Western populations.

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Roxana (1724), Defoe's last and darkest novel, is the autobiography of a woman who has traded her virtue, at first for survival, and then for fame and fortune. Its narrator tells the story of her own `wicked' life as the mistress of rich and powerful men. A resourceful adventuress, she is also an unforgiving analyst of her own susceptibilities, who tells us of the price she pays for her successes. Endowed with many seductive skills, she is herself seduced: by money, by dreams of rank, and by the illusion that she can escape her own past. Unlike Defoe's other penitent anti-heroes, however, she fails to triumph over these weaknesses. The novel's drama lies not only in the heroine's `vast variety of fortunes', but in her attempts to understand the sometimes bitter lessons of her life as a `Fortunate Mistress'. Defoe's achievement was to invent, in `Roxana', a gripping story-teller as well as a gripping story. This edition uses the rare first edition text, with a new introduction, detailed notes, textual history, and a map. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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Ghosts. Pirates. Put the two together and you’ve got a winning combination of the most exciting stories ever written. It's enough to make anyone say, "Shiver me timbers"--with delight.The spirits of Davy Jones's locker have a long and colorful history among sailors and lovers of literature. From Daniel Defoe's "The Four Years Voyages of Capt. George Roberts" to Thomas Smollet's "The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle" to Washington Irving's "Adventures of the Black Fisherman," ghost pirates swashbuckle in and out of the scene, stealing the souls of the doomed and frightening the innocent. Prepare yourself for a thrilling ride.

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'Twelve Year a Whore, fives times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv'd Honest, and died a Penitent' So the title page of this extraordinary novel describes the career of the woman known as Moll Flanders, whose real name we never discover. And so, in a tour-de-force of writing by the businessman, political satirist, and spy Daniel Defoe, Moll tells her own story, a vivid and racy tale of a woman's experience in the seamy side of life in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England and America. Born in Newgate prison, and seduced in the home of her adoptive family, she learns to live off her wits, defying the traditional depiction of women as helpless victims. First published in 1722, and one of the earliest novels in the English language, its account of opportunism, endurance, and survival speaks as strongly to us today as it did to its original readers. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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The Penguin English Library Edition of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe'I walk'd about on the shore, lifting up my hands, and my whole being, as I may say, wrapt up in the contemplation of my deliverance ... reflecting upon all my comrades that were drown'd, and that there should not be one soul sav'd but my self ... 'Who has not dreamed of life on an exotic isle, far away from civilization? Here is the novel which has inspired countless imitations by lesser writers, none of which equal the power and originality of Defoe's famous book. Robinson Crusoe, set ashore on an island after a terrible storm at sea, is forced to make do with only a knife, some tobacco, and a pipe. He learns how to build a canoe, make bread, and endure endless solitude. That is, until, twenty-four years later, when he confronts another human being. First published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe has been praised by such writers as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Johnson as one of the greatest novels in the English language.The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

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Discover Virginia Woolf’s informative and erudite critical essays on some of the key novelists and dramatists of the canon – from the ancient Greeks to Jane Austen and beyond.Virginia Woolf read, and wrote, as an outsider, denied the educational privileges of her male contemporaries. She was perhaps better able, then, to address a 'common reader' in this wide-ranging collection of essays. With all the imagination and gaiety that are the stamp of her genius, she turns from medieval England to tsarist Russia, and subjects Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian novelists and modern essayists to her wise, acute and entertaining scrutiny.Essays on Jane Austen, George Eliot, Nancy Mitford, Joseph Conrad, Michel de Montaigne, Daniel Defoe and many others.

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An exciting collection of dangerous adventures, harrowing travels, and heart-stopping journeys, Incredible Adventure and Exploration Stories compiles tales from around the globe that are sure to amaze. Popular and well-known tales of exploration venturing overland and across the sea are featured, as well as mythic tales and mesmerizing sagas from folk history and popular legend. Also included are accounts of polar expeditions, American heroes mapping uncharted territories, European navigators traveling to faraway lands. Stories are included from powerful writers such as: Herman Melville Jules Verne Arthur Conan Doyle Joseph Conrad Daniel Defoe And many more! With three dozen photographs that beautifully illustrates the tales, Incredible Adventure and Exploration Stories is the perfect gift for any reader with a love of travel.

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Menials argues that British writers of the long-eighteenth century projected their era’s economic and social anxieties onto domestic servants. Confronting the emergence of controversial principles like self-interest, emulation, and luxury, writers from Eliza Haywood, Daniel Defoe, and Samuel Richardson to Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, and William Thackeray used literary servants to critique what they saw as problematic economic and social practices. A cultural history of economic ideology as well as a literary history of domestic service, Menials traces the role of the domestic servant as a representation of the relationship between the master’s ideal self and the cultural forces that threaten it.

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'How is the mind agitated and bewildered, at being thus, as it were, placed on the borders of a new world!' - William Bartram 'Thus you see, dear sister, the manners of mankind do not differ so widely as our voyage writers would have us believe.' - Mary Wortley Montagu With widely varied motives - scientific curiosity, commerce, colonization, diplomacy, exploration, and tourism - British travellers fanned out to every corner of the world in the period the Critical Review labelled the 'Age of Peregrination'. The Empire, already established in the Caribbean and North America, was expanding in India and Africa and founding new outposts in the Pacific in the wake of Captain Cook's voyages. In letters, journals, and books, travellers wrote at first-hand of exotic lands and beautiful scenery, and encounters with strange peoples and dangerous wildlife. They conducted philosophical and political debates in print about slavery and the French Revolution, and their writing often affords unexpected insights into the writers themselves. This anthology brings together the best writing from authors such as Daniel Defoe, Celia Fiennes, Mary Wollstonecraft, Olaudah Equiano, Mungo Park, and many others, to provide a comprehensive selection from this emerging literary genre. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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