Дипломная работа: Daniel Defoe and His Novel Robinson Crusoe

Daniel Defoe had various hardships but he could fight for survival with astonishing steadfastness staunchness. Defoe could become one of first English professional journalists, editors of influential political newspapers and even private secret of very high ranking persons. Very important Person (Vips) of the government. But in a situation of complex and severe social and political fight he could not fairly well to do and even quite existing for himself. Political Discords strafes pains (низо, шифок,) and court intrigues brought him to the prison and to a Pillory. But in spite of all these. Defoe continued to write and publish books, booklets, and articles about everything which seemed to him worth of informing his contemporaries.

During more than three years Defoe openly, anonymously and under other pennames published pamphlets on very sharp political and international problems. He also wrote philosophical and law treatises, economical works, hand books, guides, manuals (йул – йурикдастурланаллар, кулланмалар) for traders, advices for those who were going to get married, all kinds of advices how to behave oneself in the society a poem about painting, general history of handicraft trades, and so on and so forth. Daniel Defoe used to say that he was thirty times rich and poor.

The huge library of written and used by him works wonder us not only with their great member, but also with quantity of names, as well as with their belongings to different fields of life and knowledge, which his creative curious thoughts and ideas none of those works were published under his own name.

Defoe published them giving the authorship to the heroes, Rescuing his books for real manuscripts or diaries, written in the name of the first person. These were the writings of sailors and merchants, thieves and court intricate plotters and all types of adventurers. This feat was the reason for not considering Daniel Defoe as their author, even two centuries later.

The works of fiction, newer appear abruptly. Most of them are closely connected with the time of their creation, so this is true concerning “Robinson Crusoe” as well.

Daniel Defoe and his personality

(1660-1731) Daniel Defoe is famous was an English novelist, journalist and pamphleteer, famous for "Robinson Crusoe," "Moll Flanders," "Memoirs of a Cavalier," and many other works. He was one of the founders of the English novel. Read more about the life and works of Daniel Defoe.

1) Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas

by Macmillan E. Novak. Oxford University Press. From the publisher: "Novak illuminates such works as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, novels that changed the course of fiction in their time and have remained towering classics to this day. And he reveals a writer who was a superb observer of his times—an age of dramatic historical, Daniel Defoe is perhaps best known for his novels, Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, but he was also the quintessential "brilliant scoundrel" of the Augustan Age. In rough chronological order, Daniel Defoe was a hosier, soldier, wine merchant, factory owner, bankrupt, spy, pamphleteer, and convict, journalist, editor, political flunkey, hack writer and novelist.

In 1704, he launched the Review of the Affairs of France and of all Europe, one of the first serious political and economic newspapers in England (it folded in the aftermath of the 1712 Stamp Act). He served as editor on several other newspapers later. As a trader and nonconformist, Defoe's produced several political and social commentaries hailing the dawn of the bourgeois-capitalist age.

In the service of Robert Harley, a shadowy figure of Queen Anne's reign, Defoe's produced a detailed three-volume (1724-27) account of the economic, political and social conditions of the cities and country-sides of Great Britain. His talent was dissipated in later years when, as a political journalist, he compromised his independence as a reporter in return for political favors.

Born Daniel Foe, the son of James Foe, a butcher in Stoke Newington, London He later added the aristocratic sounding "De" to his name as a nom de plume. He became a famous pamphleteer, journalist and novelist at a time of the birth of the novel in the English language, and thus fairly ranks as one of its progenitors.

Defoe's pamphleteering and political activities resulted in his arrest and placement in a pillory on July 31, 1703. Principally on account of a pamphlet entitled "The Shortest Way with Dissenters", in which he ruthlessly satirized the High church Tories, purporting to argue for the extermination of dissenters. The publication of his poem Hymn to the Pillory, however, caused his audience at the pillory to throw flowers instead of the customary harmful and noxious objects, and to drink to his health.

After his three days in the pillory Defoe went into Negate Prison. Robert Harley. 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer brokered his release in exchange for Defoe's co-operation as an intelligence agent. He set up his periodical A Review of the Affairs of France in 1704, supporting the Harley ministry. The Review ran without interruption until 1713. When Harley lost power in 1708 Defoe continued writing it to support Go dolphin, then again to support Harley and the Tories in the Tory ministry of 1710 to 1114. After the Tories fell from power with the death of Queen Anne. Defoe continued doing intelligence work for the Whig government.

Defoe's famous novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), tells of a man's shipwreck on a desert island and his subsequent adventures. The author may have based his narrative on the true story of the shipwreck of Alexander Selkirk. (Sec Robinson Crusoe: Selkirk as the inspiration for Crusoe).

Defoe's next novel was Captain Singleton ( 720), amazing for its portrayal of the redemptive power of one man's love for another. Hans Turley has recently shown how Quaker William's love turns Captain Singleton away from the murderous life of a pirate, and the two make a solemn vow to live as a male couple happily ever after in London, disguised as Greeks and never speaking English in public, with Singleton married to William's sister as a ruse.

Defoe wrote an account of the Great Plague of 1665: A Journal of the Plague Year.

He also wrote Moll Flanders (1722), a picaresque first-person narration of the fall and eventual redemption of a lone woman in 17th century England. She appears as a whore, bigamist and thief, lives in The Mint, commits adultery and incest, yet manages to keep the reader's sympathy. This work and Roxana, The Fortunate Mistress (1724) offer remarkable examples of the way in which Defoe seems to inhabit his fictional (yet "drawn from life") characters, not least in that they are women.

Daniel Defoe died on April 21. 1731 and was interred in Bun hill Fields. London. [edit] Defoe and the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707

No fewer than 545 titles, ranging from satirical poems, political and religious pamphlets and volumes have been ascribed to Defoe. His ambitious business ventures saw him bankrupt by 1692, with a wife and seven children to support. In 1703 he published an ironic attack on the high Tories, and was prosecuted for seditious libel, sentenced to be pilloried, fined 200 marks, and be detained at the Queen's pleasure. In despair he wrote to William Paterson. the London Scot, and founder of the Bank of England and part instigator of the Darien Disaster, who was in the confidence of Robert Hartley, leading Minister and spymaster in the English Government. Hartley accepted Defoe's services and released him in 1703. He immediately published The Review, which appeared weekly, then three times a week, written mostly by himself. This was the main mouthpiece of the Government promoting the Act of Union 1707.[1]

Defoe began his campaign in The Review and other pamphlets aimed at English opinion, claiming correctly that it would end the threat from the North, gaining for the Treasury an "inexhaustible treasury of men" a valuable new market increasing the power of England. By September 1706 Hartley ordered Defoe to Edinburgh as a secret agent, to do everything possible to help secure acquiescence of the Treaty. He was very conscious of the risk to himself Thanks to books such The Letters of Daniel Defoe, (edited by GH Healey, Oxford 1955) which are readily far more is known about his activities than is usual with such agents.

His first reports were of vivid descriptions of violent demonstrations against the Union. "A Scots rabble is the worst of its kind," he reported. Years later John Clerk of Penacook, a leading Unionist, wrote in his memories that,

"He was a spy among us, but not known as such, otherwise the Mob of Edinburgh would pull him to pieces."

Defoe being a Presbyterian, who suffered in England for his convictions, was accepted as an adviser to the Assembly of the Church and Parliamentary Committees. He told Hartley that he was "privy to all their folly", but "Perfectly unsuspected as with corresponding with anybody in England." He was then able to influence the proposals that were put to Parliament and reported back: "Having had the honor to be always sent for the committee to whom these amendments were referred, I have had the good fortune to break their measures in two particulars via the bounty on Corn and proportion of the Excise."

Yet Defoe was also a devout Presbyterian, faithful husband, doting father, and genius of the first order, a man who invented both modern journalism and the modern novel in his furious forty-year career. His greatest achievement, Robinson Crusoe, is a masterpiece of religious prose that has appeared in over 1,200 editions in English alone, has been translated into almost every known language, and continues to instruct delighted readers, as it has for nearly three hundred years, on the basics of Christian civilization by means of one of the most exciting adventure stories ever penned.

How to reconcile the two Defoe’s? This is the mystery that any biographer must confront, and one that Richard West only partially resolves.

The enigma begins with Defoe's birth. We remain uncertain about his year or place of birth, although 1661 in the parish of St. Giles, Cripple gate, seems likely. Raised a Dissenter—a Presbyterian in an Anglican nation—he was barred from Oxford and Cambridge and instead received three years of higher education under the Reverend Charles Morton, a future vice-president of Harvard University who drilled his pupils in science, modern tongues, and the intricacies of English rhetoric. Defoe learned his lessons well. He took away with him a superb prose style and a burning resentment of the upper classes who had denied him entrance to Oxbridge, coupled with a scarcely-disguised just to join their ranks—a blend of envy and hatred common among young middle-class men even today.

As West suggested, this ambivalence toward social betters was one of Defoe's driving obsessions. Another was his terror of debt and his sense of being hounded by creditors, as well as by literary and political opponents. Defoe relished the harsh world of late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century business, when capitalism was coming of age; unfortunately, he had an uncanny knack for investing in projects that left him in ruins. He traded in cows, bricks, tobacco, honey, land, diving bells, and even civet cats, almost always for a loss. By his early thirties, Defoe had squandered his wife's considerable dowry, was in debt for 17,000 pounds, and had declared bankruptcy—an act that barred him for life from public service. West describes the aftermath with typical empathy: "The torment of mind he suffered . . . condemned him to a life of misery, fear, loneliness, and remorse, from which he could only escape through prayer, the love of his family, and eventually by writing books."

Defoe responded to the crisis with characteristic ingenuity: He decided to switch careers and become journalist—and not just any journalist. As West enthuses, "He was the first master, if not the inventor, of almost every feature of modern newspapers, including the leading article, investigative reporting, the foreign news analysis, the agony aunt, the gossip column, the candid obituary, and even the kind of soul-searching piece which Fleet Street calls the 'Why, Oh Why."1

This new venture unleashed the best and worst in Defoe. On the one hand, he delighted in subterfuge. He wrote bogus letters to the editor, bogus travelogues, bogus histories; he worked as a journalistic double agent, writing for Tory journals while in the employ of the Whigs; he delighted in printing anti-Catholic drivel (and spent a lifetime seething about "Popish Plots," including, so he thought, the Great London Fire of 1666); he raked up scandal wherever he could, insulting enemies and shocking friends.