Daniel Defoe
Author
Publisher
Hesperus
Pub. Date
2002
Language
English
Description
He was a British merchant, manufacturer, insurer, and spy, but Daniel Defoe eventually found his true calling as a writer-and his masterful fiction has endeared him to readers all over the world. A prolific author who published over 500 novels, travel guides, pamphlets, and journals, he was best known for his 1719 adventure novel Robinson Crusoe. Soon after the enormous success of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe wrote this compelling account of high-seas drama...
Author
Publisher
Thorndike Press
Pub. Date
2004
Language
English
Description
Daniel Defoe's great talent as a writer was to speak in the voices of others. Such was the authenticity of this memoir of a 17th-century soldier of fortune that for over half a century it was considered to be genuine. The struggle of the narrator to turn his observations into facts and to make certain history out of his uncertain experiences combines with vivid descriptions of the battles of the Civil War to give the narrative its dramatic qualities....
Author
Publisher
Bibliophilist Society
Pub. Date
[1931]
Language
English
Description
Daniel Defoe's last novel "Roxana" is perhaps his darkest. Using his "fallen woman" archetype established in his seminal work "Moll Flanders," Defoe tracks the mercurial life of an unnamed female protagonist who adopts the pseudonym Roxana. The story of her rise and fall is a captivating account of the destructive powers of greed and seduction. Roxana begins as a deserted wife with five children. She chooses a life of prostitution for sustenance,...
6) The storm
Author
Publisher
Penguin
Pub. Date
2005
Language
English
Description
On the evening of 26th November 1703, a cyclone from the north Atlantic hammered into southern Britain at over seventy miles an hour, claiming the lives of over 8,000 people. Eyewitnesses reported seeing cows left stranded in the branches of trees and windmills ablaze from the friction of their whirling sails. For Defoe, bankrupt and just released from prison for seditious writings, the storm struck during one of his bleakest moments. But it also...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Contemporary fiction. 'I walk'd about on the shore, lifting up my hands, and my whole being, as I may say, wrapt up in the contemplation of my deliverance . . . reflecting upon all my comrades that were drown'd, and that there should not be one soul sav'd but my self . . . ' Who has not dreamed of life on an exotic isle, far away from civilization? Here is the novel which has inspired countless imitations by lesser writers, none of which equal the...
Author
Series
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Language
English
Description
"Roxana (1724), Defoe's last and darkest novel, is the autobiography of a woman who has traded her virtue, at first for survival, and then for fame and fortune. Its narrator tells the story of her own 'wicked' life as the mistress of rich and powerful men. Endowed with many seductive skills, she is herself seduced: by money, by dreams of rank, and by the illusion that she can escape her own past. Unlike Defoe's other penitent anti-heroes, however,...
14) Robinson Crusoe
Author
Series
Publisher
Sterling Pub
Pub. Date
2006
Language
English
Description
An abridged version of the tale of Englishman Robinson Crusoe, who, after becoming the sole survivor of a 1659 shipwreck, lives on a deserted island for more than twenty-eight years.
Author
Series
Publisher
W.W. Norton
Pub. Date
©1992
Language
English
Description
Presents the annotated text of Daniel Defoe's fictionalized account of what it was like to live in London in 1665 when the city was in the grip of plague, and includes background on the London epidemic and other outbreaks, essays on the theme of community in crisis, and critical reviews of the novel.