In this book, Paula Backscheider considers Daniel Defoe's entire
canon as related, developing, and in close dynamic relationship to
the literature of its time. In so doing, she revises our conception
of the contexts of Defoe's work and reassesses his achievement and
contribution as a writer. By restoring a literary context for
modern criticism, Backscheider argues the intensity and integrity
of Defoe's artistic ambitions, demonstrating that everything he
wrote rests solidly upon extensive reading of books published in
England, his understanding of the reading tastes of his
contemporaries, and his engagement with the issues and events of
his time. Defoe, the dedicated professional writer and innovator,
emerges with a new wholeness, and certain of his novels assume new
significance. Defoe's literary status continues to be debated and
misunderstood. Even critical studies of the novel often begin with
Richardson rather than Defoe. By moving from Defoe's poetry,
pamphlets, and histories to the novels, Backscheider offers an
argument for the thematic and stylistic coherency of his oeuvre and
for a recognition of the dominant place he held in shaping the
English novel. For example, Defoe deserves to be recognized as the
true originator of the historical novel, for three of his fictions
are deeply engaged with just those conceptual and technical issues
common to all later historical fiction. And Roxana now appears as
Defoe's deliberate attempt to enter the fastest growing market for
fiction -- that for women readers. What have been powerfully
significant for the history of the novel, then, are the very
characteristics of his writing that have been held against his
literary stature: its contemporaneity, its mixed and untidy form,
its formal realism, its concentration on the life of an individual,
and its probing of the individual's psychological interaction with
the empirical world, making that world representative even as it is
referential. It is exactly these characteristics most original,
prominent, and subsequently imitated in Defoe's fiction that define
the form we call "novel."
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