A Journal of the Plague Year (Norton Critical Editions) - Softcover

Daniel Defoe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393961885 ISBN 13: 9780393961881

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992

Synopsis

This Norton Critical Edition of one of Defoe’s most important works reprints the 1722 text, the only edition published in Defoe’s lifetime.

The authoritative text has been fully annotated and makes available a perennially popular novel, one that has often been mistaken for an actual eyewitness account of the last great plague in England.

"Backgrounds" encourages comparison of 1665 documents with those of the early 1720s, when England feared a new outbreak of the plague.

Included are official government orders and newspaper accounts as well as writings by Defoe, John Graunt, the College of Physicians, and others.

"Contexts" includes eight comparative pieces united by the theme of a community in crisis.

From Thucydides to Boccaccio to modern accounts by Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, and Susan Sontag, this collection represents some of the most celebrated observers and critics in western civilization who have seen what plagues reveal about human nature.

"Criticism" reprints seven of the best essays on the novel, including interpretations by Sir Walter Scott, Maximillian E. Novak, John J. Richetti, and John Bender, among others.

A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

About this title

From the Publisher:

8 1-hour cassettes

From the Inside Flap:

Defoe's account of the bubonic plague that swept London in 1665 remains as vivid as it is harrowing. Based on Defoe's own childhood memories and prodigious research, A Journal of the Plague Year walks the line between fiction, history, and reportage. In meticulous and unsentimental detail it renders the daily life of a city under siege; the often gruesome medical precautions and practices of the time; the mass panics of a frightened citizenry; and the solitary travails of Defoe's narrator, a man who decides to remain in the city through it all, chronicling the course of events with an unwavering eye. Defoe's Journal remains perhaps the greatest account of a natural disaster ever written.
This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the original edition published in 1722.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0393961885
• ISBN 13: 9780393961881
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384
• Editor: Paula R. Backscheider