DANIEL DEFOE
Daniel Defoe by Michael Van der Gucht (Flemish, 1660-1725), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Dates: 1660-1731
Gender: Male
Nationality: British/English
a.k.a: Daniel Foe, Andrew Moreton
Editor
Essayist
Journalist
Moralist
Novelist
Poet
Political writer
Pamphleteer
Publisher
Story-writer
Bibliography of Works
Literary Periods:
Augustan Period, 1700-1745
Eighteenth Century, 1700-1799
Neoclassical Period, 1660-1785
Contemporary Writers & Topics
SUGGESTED BOOKS
Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas by Call Number: PR3406 .N68 2001ISBN: 0198126867
MOVIES AT COLBY
- Robinson Crusoe byCall Number: DVD PN1997 .R625 2004
- Moll Flanders byCall Number: Video 3403 1-2
EXHIBIT
Enter the Daniel Defoe Exhibition | The Lilly Library, Indiana University
Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) is considered one of England's first novelists. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (1722), published three years after his enormously successful first novel, Robinson Crusoe, follows the adventures of a lower-class London woman forced by circumstances into a life of crime, her transportation to Virginia as a convict, and eventual redemption. -ECCO
REFERENCE & BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Scribner Writers Sieries 
Biography and critical essay on the life and works of Daniel Defoe, including complete works and suggested reading bibliographies; Enter your author's name last-name-first, like this...
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- Search Literature Resource Center for DefoeIncludes entries from Dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary Authors, Twayne's Authors Series, and Scribner Writers Series
- Literature Online [LION]Biographical overview, complete bibliography, journal articles, audio & video recordings, and recommended Web sites
RESEARCH & CRITICISM
- MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window The Modern Language Association of America's database of journal articles, books, dissertations, working papers, proceedings, and bibliographies covering scholarship on literature, language and linguistics, folklore, literary theory and criticism, dramatic arts, printing, publishing, rhetoric, and composition, with coverage from 1926 to the present.
MLA International Bibliography is the definitive literary research database, indexing the most authoritative Defoe scholarship published in books and academic journals. MLA indexes and links to the entire JSTOR literary research collection as well as linking to many other full-text providers and the Colby College Libraries catalog. If you discover books or articles through MLA that are not available at Colby or through our lending partners, please request these items using your ILLiad Account.
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PRIMARY SOURCES ONLINE
Full list of texts by Daniel Defoe at the Colby College Libraries
Full-texts are often available online through ECCO and EEBO (see descriptions below)
You'll also want to check out...
- Online books by Daniel DefoeA project of UPenn, Online Books lists over 1 million free books on the Web;
also see Defoe texts at Project Gutenberg - The Landscape of Daniel Defoe's Moll FlandersPart of the British Library's Literary Landscapes online exhibition, this collection of maps depicts locations in Defoe's Moll Flanders
- A Survey of the Cities of London and WestminsterFunded by the Leverhulme Trust, this project has produced a full-text electronic version of John Strype’s enormous two-volume 1720 edition of A Survey of London, complete with its celebrated maps and plates, which depict the prominent buildings, street plans and ward boundaries of the late Stuart capital.
- Early English Books Online This link opens in a new windowA searchable collection of digitized early English-language books, including virtually every such work published in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and British North America from from 1473 to 1700.
- Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) This link opens in a new windowOnline access to over 180,000 books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides, and other publications from the 18th century, primarily in the English language.
- Literature Online (LION) This link opens in a new windowA database of English-language literature, containing thousands of full-text works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, as well as journals, author biographies, bibliographies, criticism, and reference resources.
Robinson Crusoe (2014) by
Robinson Crusoe is one of the most famous literary characters in history, and his story has spawned hundreds of retellings. Inspired by the life of Alexander Selkirk, a sailor who lived for several years on a Pacific island, the novel tells the story of Crusoe's survival after shipwreck on an island, interaction with the mainland's native inhabitants, and eventual rescue. Read variously as economic fable, religious allegory, or imperialist fantasy, Crusoe has never lost its appeal as one of the most compelling adventure stories of all time. In addition to an introduction and helpful notes, this Broadview Edition includes a wide range of appendices that situate Defoe's 1719 novel amidst castaway narratives, economic treatises, reports of cannibalism, explorations of solitude, and Defoe's own writings on slavery and the African trade. A final appendix presents images of Crusoe's rescue of Friday from a dozen of the most significant illustrated editions of the novel published between 1719 and 1920.
Call Number: Miller PR3403 .A1 2014ISBN: 9781554812141
Moll Flanders (1989) by
Daniel Defoe's bawdy tale of a woman's struggle for independence and redemption, Moll Flanders is edited with an introduction and notes by David Blewett in Penguin Classics. Born in Newgate prison and abandoned six months later, Moll Flanders' drive to find and hold on to a secure place in society propels her through incest, adultery, bigamy, prostitution and a resourceful career as a thief ('the greatest Artist of my time') before her crimes catche up with her, and she is transported to the colony of Virginia in the New World. If Moll Flanders is on one level a Puritan's tale of sin and repentance, through self-made, self-reliant Moll, Daniel Defoe's rich subtext conveys all the paradoxes and amoralities of the struggle for property and power in the newly individualistic society of Eighteenth-century England. Based on the first edition of 1722, this volume includes a chronology, suggestions for further reading, notes on currency and maps of London and Virginia in the late seventeenth century. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) had a variety of careers including merchant, soldier, spy, and political pamphleteer. Over the course of his life Daniel Defoe wrote over two hundred and fifty books on economics, history, biography and crime, but is best remembered for the fiction he produced in late life, which includes Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724). Defoe had a great influence on the development of the English novel and many consider him to be the first true novelist. If you enjoyed Moll Flanders, you might like Samuel Richardson's Pamela, also available in Penguin Classics.
Call Number: Miller PR3404 .F65 1959ISBN: 9780140433135
PRIMARY SOURCES IN PRINT
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The Works of Daniel Defoe edited by G.H. Maynadier
You'll also want to check out... Works by Defoe in Colby's Special Collections
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Defoe's Papers/Archives The British Library:
Huntington Library: "Meditations" William Andrews Clark Library:
British Library, the Public Record Office, the National Archives of Scotland, and the National Library of Scotland: Letters (DLB) |