Defoe Daniel

Daniel Defoes 1722 novel, Moll Flanders, remains a fascinating imaginative work, and is in many ways more interesting than his famous first effort, Robinson Crusoe. Having seen bits of two recent film adaptations in the last couple of months on television, and being a budding 18th century scholar, I decided it was time I picked up my own copy of Moll Flanders and see the actual product on its own terms. A story no less about a castaway and delinquent than Crusoe, in Moll Flanders, Defoe attempts...

Probably one of the first examples of journalistic fiction, Defoes A Journal of the Plague Year is a pseudo-eyewitness account of the London plague of 1665. Writing this in 1722, Defoe casts himself into the role of his uncle whom he calls H.F. and who recounts the events in grisly detail but with magnanimous compassion. Aside from the prose, the book has a surprisingly modern edge in the way it combines facts about a sensationally dire historical event with human interest stories for personal...