Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions: His Life and Works

Daniel 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 on anything 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 works such 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. 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stories, which he presented to his future wife under the sobriquet Bellmour, to his Compleat English Gentleman, left unpublished at his death, Defoe was pre-eminently a creator of fictions.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 Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Abbreviations Preface 1: After the Revolution 2: The education of a Dissenter 3: Meditation of matters spiritual and secular 4: Marriage and rebellion 5: Financial woes and recovery 6: Propagandist for William III 7: The True-Born Englishman and other satires 8: An age of plot and deceit 9: From pilloried libeller to Government propagandist 10: 'Writing history sheet by sheet': Defoe, The Review 11: From public journalist to lunar philosopher 12: Defoe as spy and Whig propagandist 13: A 'true spy' in Scotland 14: In limbo between causes and masters 15: Journalism and history in 'an age of mysteries and paradoxes' 16: How to sell out while keeping one's integrity (somewhat) intact in that 'Lunatick Age' 17: These dangerous times 18: 'A miserable divided nation' 19: A change of monarchs 20: Times when honest men must reserve themselves for better fortunes 21: Corrector general of the press 22: The year before Robinson Crusoe: intellectual controversies and experiments in fiction 23: Robinson Crusoe and the variability of life 24: After Crusoe: pirate adventures, military memoirs, and the South Sea scandal 25: Creating fictional worlds 26: Describing Britain in the 1720s 27: Enter Henry Baker 28: Last productive years 29: Sinking under the weight of affliction Works cited Index

About the Author :
Professor Maximillian E. Novak is Professor of English Literature at UCLA. He obtained his D.Phil from Oxford in 1961 and his interests include Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature; the Novel; Jewish-American Literature, Libertinism, Restoration Drama, the rise of the novel, primitivism, sensibility, madness, painting and the novel, the Gothic novel, Jewish-American writing of the immigrant period and after 1930

Review :
`Review from previous edition Scrupulous and intelligent, and gives a finely tuned portrait of an ambitious man often living against the flow of his world but illuminating it with extraordinary historical perspective.' Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times 12/05/01 `Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions is a sturdy account of the man often credited with being Britain's first novelist. But, as Maximillian E. Novak shows in this scholarly and meticulous book, Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders and Roxana are far from being the only reasons to read about Defoe's life. Everything about him, from his loving family life to his pragmatic support of the social and political Establishment which best served his interests, strikes one as utterly modern. As indeed, does his fatal love of luxury goods. Thank heavens he never had a Barclaycard.' Kathryn Hughes, Book of the Week, Mail on Sunday 22 April 2001