The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe

by Seager, Nicholas; Downie, J. A.

• ISBN13: 9780198827177
• ISBN10: 0198827172
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2024-02-29
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Nicholas Seager, Professor of English Literature and Head of the School of Humanities, Keele University,J. A. Downie, Emeritus Professor of English, Goldsmiths, University of London

Nicholas Seager is Professor of English Literature and Head of the School of Humanities at Keele University. He has published on literature of the long eighteenth century, including Bunyan, Swift, Defoe, Richardson, Johnson, Sterne, Goldsmith, and Austen. He is the editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Daniel Defoe (2022), and co-editor of The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction (2015) and The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver's Travels (2023). He has recently completed an edition of Defoe's The Fortunate Mistress for Oxford World's Classics.

J. A. Downie is Emeritus Professor of English at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he was Dean of the Faculty of Arts from 1991 to 1995 and Pro-Warden (Academic) from 1995 to 2002. His books include Robert Harley and the Press (1979), Jonathan Swift, Political Writer (1984), To Settle the Succession of the State: Literature and Politics, 1678-1750 (1994), and A Political Biography of Henry Fielding (2009). He edited two volumes in the Pickering Masters edition of The Works of Daniel Defoe. He also edited of The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel (2016).

Table of Contents

1. Defoe's Life and Times, Brian Cowan
Part I. Genres
2. Defoe's Poetry, Maximillian E. Novak
3. Defoe, Prose Fiction, and the Novel, Geoffrey Sill
4. Defoe and Drama, Cynthia Wall
5. Dialogue and Didacticism: Defoe's Conduct and Advice Literature, Penny Pritchard
6. The Great Polemicist: Defoe's Pamphlets and Tracts, Jeffrey Hopes
7. Defoe's Periodical Journalism, Ashley Marshall
8. Defoe and the Idea of Travel, Paul Baines
9. Defoe as Historian, Rebecca Bullard
10. The Style of Defoe's Correspondence, Marc Mierowsky
11. Defoe and Satire, Joseph Hone
Part II. Contexts
12. Defoe and the Book Trade, Pat Rogers
13. Daniel Defoe and the Social Structure of Pre-Industrial England, J. A. Downie
14. Defoe and Economics: Industry, Trade, and Finance, Nicholas Seager
15. Gender, Sexuality, and the Status of Women in Defoe's Writings, Paula R. Backscheider
16. Family and Domesticity in Defoe's Writings, Liz Bellamy
17. Defoe and Christianity, David Walker
18. Defoe, Philosophy, and Religion, John Richetti
19. Defoe, Science, and Technology, Christopher F. Loar
20. Defoe and Government: Propaganda and Principle, D. W. Hayton
21. Intelligence, Espionage, and the Ethics of Surveillance in Defoe's Writings, Katherine Ellison
22. Defoe and War, Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson
23. Crime and the Law in Defoe's Works, Kate Loveman
24. Racial and National Identities in Defoe's Writings, Srividhya Swaminathan
25. Defoe and Ecology, Lucinda Cole
Part III. Places
26. Defoe and London, Brean S. Hammond
27. Defoe and Britain, Adam Sills
28. Defoe's Europe: Allies and Enemies, Andreas K. E. Mueller
29. Defoe and Colonialism, Markman Ellis
30. Defoe and the Pacific, Robert Markley
31. Africa and the Levant in Defoe's Writings, Rebekah Mitsein and Manushag N. Powell
Part IV. Afterlives
32. The Celebrated Daniel De Foe: Publication History, 1731-1945, Nicholas Seager
33. Defoe's Critical Reception, 1731-1945, Kit Kincade
34. Attribution and the Defoe Canon, Benjamin F. Pauley
35. Habits of Gender and Genre in Three Female Robinsonades, 1767-1985, Rivka Swenson
36. Defoe on Screen: Robinson Crusoe, The Red Turtle, and Animal Rights, Robert Mayer