Cambridge studies in eighteenth-century English literature and thought ;
Volume Designation
16
INTERNAL BIBLIOGRAPHIES/INDEXES NOTE
Text of Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
CONTENTS NOTE
Text of Note
1. Romancing the real: the "field" of criminal biography -- 2. Defoe's realism: rough frames, strange voices, surprisingly various subjects and readers made more present to themselves -- 3. The copious text: opening the door to inference, or, room for those who know how to read it -- 4. Intimations of an invisible hand: the mind exercised, enlarged, and kept in play by strange concurrences -- 5. The general scandal upon business: unanswerable doubts, and the text as a field supporting very nice distinctions -- 6. The frontiers of dishonesty, the addition and concurrence of circumstances: more on the strategic situating of names -- 7. Notions different from all the world: criminal stupidity, the self and the symbolic order -- Closing comments: truth, complexity, common sense, and empty spaces.
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SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and Roxana are given extended readings in individual chapters. Other topics considered at length include the vexed question of Defoe's realism, his own version of reader response theory and how he deploys it, the novels' structural imitation of providential design, and his recurrent, almost obsessive effort to blunt or deny the commonly held notion that trade was somehow equivalent to theft.
Text of Note
This book seeks to recover something of the original excitement, challenge, and significance of Defoe's four novels of criminal life by reading them within and against the conventions of early eighteenth-century criminal biography. Crime raised deeply troubling questions in Defoe's time, not least because it seemed a powerful sign of the breakdown of traditional social authority and order. Arguing that Defoe's novels provided ways of facing working through, as well as avoiding, certain of the moral and intellectual difficulties that crime raised for him and his readers, Faller shows how the "literary," even "aesthetic" qualities of his fiction contributed to these ends. Analyzing the various ways in which Defoe's novels exploited, deformed, and departed from the genre they imitate, this book attempts to define the specific social and political (which is to say moral and ideological) value of a given set of "literary" texts against those of a more "ordinary" form of narrative.
SPINE TITLE
Spine Title
Crime & Defoe
PERSONAL NAME USED AS SUBJECT
Defoe, Daniel,1661?-1731-- Criticism and interpretation.
Defoe, Daniel,1661-1731.
Defoe, Daniel, 1660-1731, The history and remarkable life of the truly honourable Colonel Jacque, commonly call'd Colonel Jack
Defoe, Daniel, 1661-1731
Defoe, Daniel, 1661-1731, The fortunate mistress
Defoe, Daniel, 1661-1731, The fortunes and misfortunes of the famous Moll Flanders
Defoe, Daniel,(1661?-1731)-- Critique et interprétation.
Defoe, Daniel,1661?-1731.
Defoe, Daniel.
Defoe, Daniel., Fortunate mistress.
Defoe, Daniel., Fortunes and misfortunes of the famous Moll Flanders.
Defoe, Daniel., History and remarkable life of the truly honourable Colonel Jacque, commonly call'd Colonel Jack.