Moll Flanders Daniel Defoe

In an age in which promiscuity, free living and women's liberation were not the catch phrases they have grown to become in this modern era, the title character of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders lives a life of sexual independence that was shunned in...

Much of the critical debate surrounding Daniel Defoe's novel Moll Flanders centers around whether the author makes good on the promise he makes in the preface that the story will be morally instructive. For instance, Ira Konigsberg writes that...

The themes of money and rank are clearly present in both Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. In both works, the quest for money and a high rank is depicted as a driving force behind human actions and the necessity...

In Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe constructs an image of a woman who is resourceful, self-sufficient, shrewd and independent. His Moll came from nothing, born to a mother imprisoned in Newgate, born to this underworld of contained vice and...

The seventy-year-old Moll Flanders who narrates her own life story considers herself a reformed criminal. But to what degree should her perceived transgressions cause her to actually be understood as such? After all, Defoe’s novel makes it clear...

Since feudal times, class has played a distinctly formative role within social structure in England. Whether a person resided within the upper class, middle class, or lower class could determine political influence, economic success, and social...

The struggle between women and authority has been a central concern for novelists throughout the ages, yet the rise of the novel in the 18th century brought with it the increase in number of female narrators and authors, giving women a platform...

The English novel is a mode that is highly sympathetic to the inequalities of sex. At its inception, it was considered a very feminine form, unworthy of serious academic consideration. The novel had to struggle to establish itself as a legitimate...

The ultimate irony of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders is that the apparent good circumstances protagonist Moll arrives in by the end of the novel - the accumulation of money and materials - are precisely the results of the criminal practices of those...