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DANIEL DEFOE: EXPERIMENTER IN PROSE.
Abstract
When Daniel Defoe began writing fiction he was nearly sixty years old, and from 1719 to 1724 he published in rapid succession five popular works of fiction. His literary accomplishment, usually acknowledged as the starting point of the English novel, conspicuously remains outside the literary movement embedded in the Augustan poetics of the early eighteenth century, the "Age of Reason." Daniel Defoe does not stand with Pope or Swift, who are recognized. as authors characteristic of the early eighteenth century. Nor does he usually stand with Richardson or Fielding, who are generally acclaimed for their novelistic techniques. Rather, he appears usually as an isolated historical fact in the chronological account of the history of the novel-- he was first. The isolation of Defoe from the dominant literary movement of the early eighteenth century is justifiable, for he wrote fiction from a world view based on the seventeenth-century scientific movement.
Subject Area
Literature
Recommended Citation
MEGLEY, SHEILA ELLEN, "DANIEL DEFOE: EXPERIMENTER IN PROSE." (1974). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI7503386.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI7503386