Includes bibliographical references (pages 707-740) and index
Introduction -- After the Revolution -- Education of a dissenter -- Meditating on matters spiritual and secular -- Marriage and rebellion -- Financial woes and recovery -- Propagandist for William III -- True-born Englishman and other satires -- Age of plot and deceit, of contradiction and paradox -- From pilloried libeller to government propagandist -- Writing history sheet by sheet : Defoe, The review, and The storm -- From public journalist to lunar philosopher -- Defoe as spy and Whig propagandist -- True spy in Scotland -- In limbo between causes and masters -- Journalism and history in an age of mysteries and paradoxes -- How to sell out while keeping one's integrity (somewhat) intact in that lunatick age -- These dangerous times : or wild doings in this world -- Miserable divided nation -- Change of monarchs and the Whig's revenge -- Times when honest men must reserve themselves for better fortunes -- Corrector general of the press : a digression on Defoe as a journalist -- Year before Robinson Crusoe : intellectual controversies and experiments in fiction -- Robinson Crusoe and the variability of life -- After Crusoe : pirate adventures, military memoirs and the South Sea scandal -- Creating fictional worlds -- Describing Britain in the 1720s -- Enter Henry Baker -- Last productive years -- Sinking under the weight of affliction
0
"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. 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stories, which he presented to his future wife under the sobriquet Bellmour, to his Compleat English Gentleman, left unpublished at his death, Defoe was pre-eminently a creator of fictions.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 such great works as Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana."--Jacket