Daniel Defoe led an exciting and indeed precarious life. A provocative pamphleteer and journalist, a spy and double agent, a revolutionary and a dreamer, he was variously hunted by mobs with murderous intent and treated as a celebrity by the most powerful leaders of the country. Imprisoned many times, pilloried and reviled by his enemies, through it all he managed to produce some of the most significant literature of the eighteenth century.
Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions is the first biography to view Defoe's complex life through the angle of vision that is most important to us as...

The two plots of this tragicomedy concern a black prince sold into slavery and two white women who are husband-hunting in Surinam. Through a discussion of the status of women in the period and of attitudes towards slavery, the editors demonstrated Southerne's complex attempt to explore a parallel between the conditions of slaves and women in contemporary society. They also consider the play in terms of Southerne's high Tory politics and in its own rights as effective drama. Based on a collection of seven editions published within Southerne's life-time, this modern edition includes a section...

Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe s Robinson Crusoe and Other Narratives: Finding 'The Thing Itself' explores important problems in the fiction of Daniel Defoe, from his interest in rendering reality (what he called the Thing itself ), whether in painting or prose fiction, to the various ways in which Defoe s works were read by contemporaries and by those novelists who attempted to imitate and comment upon his Life and Strange Surprizing Adventure of Robinson Crusoe decades after its publication. A number of sections of the book attempt to consider the complexities of various...