Description
Michael Shinagel has collated the reprint with all six authorizededitions published by Taylor in 1719 to achieve a text that is faithfulto Defoe's original edition. Annotations assist the reader with obscurewords and idioms, biblical references, and nautical terms. "Contexts" helps the reader understand the novel's historical andreligious significance. Included are four contemporary accounts ofmarooned men, Defoe's autobiographical passages on the novel'sallegorical foundation, and aspects of the Puritan emblematic traditionessential for understanding the novel's religious aspects. "Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century Opinions" is a comprehensive studyof early estimations by prominent literary and political figures,including Alexander Pope, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Johnson, SamuelTaylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Edgar Allen Poe, Thomas BabingtonMacaulay, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill. "Twentieth-Century Criticism" is a collection of fourteen essays (fiveof them new to the Second Edition) that presents a variety ofperspectives on Robinson Crusoe by Virginia Woolf, Ian Watt, EricBerne, Maximillian E. Novak, Frank Budgen, James Joyce, George A.Starr, J. Paul Hunter, James Sutherland, John J. Richetti, LeopoldDamrosch, Jr., John Bender, Michael McKeon, and Carol Houlihan Flynn. A Chronology of Defoe's life and work and an updated SelectedBibliography are also included.
About the Author
Daniel Defoe was many people in one man: a trader, a writer, a traveller, and a spy. He was born in London on September 13, 1660. He is most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe and is considered among the founders of the English novel along with Aphra Behn and Samuel Richardson. His other notable fictional works include The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720), A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), and Moll Flanders (1722). Defoe also wrote various pamphlets, often giving a critical judgement on the current political scenarios. His An Essay upon Projects (1697) was published as a series which advocated social and economic improvements. He also satirised the English notion of racial purity in his poem "The True-Born Englishman" (1701). Defoe died at the age of 70 in London on April 24, 1731.
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