Daniel Defoe
Daniel Defoe led an
exciting and indeed precarious life. A provocative pamphleteer and journalist,
a spy and 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 many times, pilloried and reviled by his
enemies, through it all he managed to produce some of the most significant
literature of the 18th century.
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. Maximillian Novak, a leading authority on Defoe, ranges
from the writer's 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his future wife under the sobriquet Bellmour, to his Compleat English Gentleman , left unpublished at his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. Novak illuminates such works as Robinson
Crusoe and Moll Flanders , novels that changed the
course of fiction in their time and have remained towering classics to this
day. And he reveals a writer who was a superb observer of his times--an age of
dramatic historical, political, and social change. Indeed, through his many
pamphlets, newspapers, books of travel, and works of fiction, Defoe commented
on everything from birth control to the price of coal, and from flying machines
to the dangers of the plague.
Beautifully and authoritatively written, this is the first serious, full-scale
biography of Defoe to appear in a decade. It gives us, for the first time, a
full understanding of the thought and personal experience that lie behind some
of the great works of English literature.
"A must, not only
for fans of 18th-century literature, but for students of the political, social
and religious history of the period as well."--The Economist
"Novak's compelling
biography should help redeem the critical neglect Defoe's work has
suffered."--Tom Paulin,
"Scrupulous and
intelligent...a finely tuned portrait of an ambitious man often living against
the flow of his world but illuminating it with extraordinary historical
perspective."--Jackie Wullschalger, Financial Times
"Admirably
researched and eminently readable. Mr. Novack's
biography takes its place as the indispensable guide to the cultural context in
which Defoe lived his life and, through his writings, attempted to negotiate it's contradictions." - -The
Scriblerian
"Novak here
presents an in-depth examination of Defoe's life and times. This is a
definitive study of the novelist, journalist, and pamphlet writer."--Library Journal (starred reivew)
"The publication of
Novak's Daniel Defoe, Master of Fiction: His Life
and Ideas is a major publishing event: it represents the first
authoritative biography of Defoe in the new millennium as well as a magnum opus
by the leading Defoe scholar of the past forty years.... Novak presents his
narrative in an engaging and graceful prose style that renders the mass of
material he discusses easily accessible and comprehensible, if not often also
fascinating. Novak is to be complimented in producing without question the most
definitive life of Defoe in the last 270 years. It will stand as the benchmark
of Defoe biographies for the twenty-first century. In sum Novak's Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions is a signal
scholarly achievement, a monumental capstone to his distinguished career as a
Defoe scholar."--The Age of Johnson
"[Defoe's work] now
shares the stage with Backscheider's as a definitive
biography, and protruding from the mass of often fanciful biographical
speculation there is a mass of solid information and precise critical and
historical discussion about Defoe's career as a writer." --Eighteenth-Century Fiction
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