Daniel Defoe

It has been until recently a given of literary history that William Beckford had his half-sister in his sights in his two burlesques on women's novel-writing. The title-page of the first quotes Pope , thus...

Paula R. Backscheider has noted the extraordinary popularity of this three-volume publication as measured in numbers of editions or re-issues: seventy-nine by 1825, eighty-nine by 1840, and in every decade from the 1730s to the...

PA began publishing early in the eighteenth century. She is chiefly known for her short novels, though she turned her hand to poetry and comedy as well. At the height of her career her rate...

CF was a remarkable, indeed a unique, travel-writer about her own country. Travelling in the later seventeenth and the early eighteenth century, and writing the account that has come down to us in the latter...

The hostile story which has her establishing herself as a confidence trickster, using her sexual charms to prey on men in the manner of fictional characters like her avowed disciple Defoe 's Roxana, is borne...

Geraldine Jewsbury 's review in the Athenæum was extremely positive. She praised the book as written with great force and earnestness, saying that even the hardened novel readers and stony-hearted critics at the Athenæumhave...

The Critical Review declined to comment on this book or to differentiate it from other religious novels. The Eclectic Review of November 1805, too, found similarities with other recent works, but dignified Interesting Conversations by...

Her new religion, rigorous as it was, did not forbid fiction. Books were at a premium in India, and MMS was delighted at encountering Defoe 's Robinson Crusoe and Richardson . A new book, or...

The book deals with the usual topics of travel writing: history, tradition, peasant life, and scenery, with a lucid exposition of the politics of the region. It includes attractive personal reminiscence. EG 's...

Robinson is the name both of the island and of one of its two long-term occupants, a recluse who has bought the island and exiled himself there out of disillusionment with human society. Behind this...

The Shipwreck presents (with memories of William ShakespeareThe Tempest as well as Daniel DefoeRobinson Crusoe) a mother and daughter as castaways on an island: the mother emulates Crusoe in resourcefulness—until the discovery of male castaways gives...

One reviewer noted ASB 's fascination with the symbolic world of the fairy tale, the dream and the artist's vision shape both the style and the content. In Crocodile Tears a woman walks away...

The child protagonist of Things Will Take a Turn, Rose (always called either Childie or Rosebud), has a grandfather who runs an unprofitable second-hand bookshop. She has read a lot and has (as well...

The bigamy scandal generated twenty-six topical publications. It provoked such works as a play by either Thomas Parker or John Holden , 1664. Later MC 's death by hanging made her an ideal subject for...

After the pasted-in pages and a section devoted to Tasso , the volume moves to a poem modelled on the tabular lists of good and evil in his life that are kept by Defoe 's...