The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe

Nicholas Seager · J. A. Downie

Nov 2023 · Oxford University Press

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The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe is the most comprehensive overview available of the author's life, times, writings, and reception. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) is a major author in world literature, renowned for a succession of novels including Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and A Journal of the Plague Year, but more famous in his lifetime as a poet, journalist, and political agent. Across his vast oeuvre, which includes books, pamphlets, and periodicals, Defoe commented on virtually every development and issue of his lifetime, a turbulent and transformative period in British and global history. Defoe has proven challenging to position--in some respects he is a traditional and conservative thinker, but in other ways he is a progressive and innovative writer. He therefore benefits from the range of critical appraisals offered in this Handbook. The Handbook ranges from concerns of gender, class, and race to those of politics, religion, and economics. In accessible but learned chapters, contributors explore salient contexts in ways that show how they overlap and intersect, such as in chapters on science, environment, and empire. The Handbook provides both a thorough introduction to Defoe and to early eighteenth-century society, culture, and literature more broadly. Thirty-six chapters by leading literary scholars and historians explore the various genres in which Defoe wrote; the sociocultural contexts that inform his works; his writings on different locales, from the local to the global; and the posthumous reception and creative responses to his works.

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Nicholas Seager is Professor of English Literature and Head of the School of Humanities at Keele University. He has published on literature of the long eighteenth century, including Bunyan, Swift, Defoe, Richardson, Johnson, Sterne, Goldsmith, and Austen. He is the editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Daniel Defoe (2022), and co-editor of The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction (2015) and The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver's Travels (2023). He has recently completed an edition of Defoe's The Fortunate Mistress for Oxford World's Classics. J. A. Downie is Emeritus Professor of English at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he was Dean of the Faculty of Arts from 1991 to 1995 and Pro-Warden (Academic) from 1995 to 2002. His books include Robert Harley and the Press (1979), Jonathan Swift, Political Writer (1984), To Settle the Succession of the State: Literature and Politics, 1678-1750 (1994), and A Political Biography of Henry Fielding (2009). He edited two volumes in the Pickering Masters edition of The Works of Daniel Defoe. He also edited of The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel (2016).