Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions by Maximillian E Novak

Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions by Maximillian E Novak

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stories, which he presented to his future wife under the sobriquet Bellmour, to his Compleat English Gentleman, left unpublished at his death, Defoe was pre-eminently a creator of fictions.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.

A finely tuned portrait of an ambitious man often living against the flow of his world* Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times *

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

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780199261543
ISBN 10	0199261547
Title	Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions
Author	Maximillian E Novak
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Year published	2003-02-13
Number of pages	776
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.