Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas - Hardcover

Novak, Maximillian E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198126867 ISBN 13: 9780198126867

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2001

Synopsis

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 eighteenth 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stories, which he presented to his future wife under the sobriquet Bellmour, to his Compleat English Gentleman, left unpublished at his death.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.

About this title

About the Author:

Maximillian E. Novak is Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was written numerous books and essays on Defoe's writing and thought. He lives in Hollywood, California.

From Library Journal:

The author of three previous books on Defoe and numerous other books and articles on 18th-century English literature, Novak (English, UCLA) here presents an in-depth examination of Defoe's life and times. He views Defoe mainly in terms of his development as a writer, so while he enumerates Defoe's family life and personal problems, he focuses on the religious, political, and social events in England that shaped him. This approach parallels Richard West's in Daniel Defoe (LJ 9/1/98), but unlike that shorter, more popular study, Novak's, with its 34-page bibliography, is a scholarly book. Though Novak often indulges in speculation about Defoe's life and writings, his assumptions are backed up by impressive research and a lifetime of studying the author. And though he greatly admires Defoe, he does not hesitate to point out the author's faults. Despite some repetitious passages, this is a definitive study of the novelist, journalist, and pamphlet writer, and it deserves to be in all larger public and college libraries. Morris A. Hounion, New York City Technical Coll. Lib., Brooklyn
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0198126867
• ISBN 13: 9780198126867
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 786