In A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe uses several methods to

create convincing history out of fiction. In developing a false journal

entry, Defoe creates authenticity primarily through the narrator, H.F..

The style and language of H.F.'s...

Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year gives the modern reader insight into the tense atmosphere of disease-infested urban London. However, the most important insights we gain from H.F.'s narrative are his observations on human behaviour,...

Class Distinctions in A Journal of the Plague Year

Defoe repeatedly returns to how different classes experienced the plague of 1660’s in his pseudo-journalistic account, A Journal of the Plague Year. Defoe contrasts the experience of the poor and...

Independence and personal freedom are fundamental values of both entire societies and individual life stories. However, within Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, contrasting physical...

Autobiography has often been a response to moments of historical crisis. Diaries such as those of Anne Frank who wrote about the hardships of living in Nazi Germany as a Jew, the Bronte Sisters who wrote of the era in which they lived, and Nelson...

Scientific Writing past paper essay. ‘What distinguishes the novel from the story […] is its essential dependence on the book.’(WALTER BENJAMIN) Trinity 2017.

Here, Walter Benjamin presents ‘the novel’ as a form distinct from ‘the story’....

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...

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...

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...

We, as individuals, seek greatness. It is a fundamental and irresistible pull that allows us to continue to move through life and seek out a greater purpose or experience. This thread, while often proving valuable, can cause us to act in ways that...

Though Robinson Crusoe may be popularly envisioned as a harrowing "adventure tale" of shipwreck and survival, the "adventures" of emotional and spiritual discourse act perhaps equally strongly to frame and direct the text. Crusoe's early travels,...

'[Robinson Crusoe is] the true prototype of the British colonist, as Friday (the trusty savage who arrives on an unlucky day) is the symbol of the subject races.' Explore.

Unquestionably Robinson Crusoe is a novel of unbridled popularity; it has...

Writing from a point of view that concludes "that the novel, as a cultural artefact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other" , Edward Said views Robinson Crusoe as "explicitly enabled by an ideology of overseas...

Daniel Defoe shipwrecks Robinson Crusoe on a deserted island, leaving him stranded for twenty-eight years. Rather than succumb to his primal urges and animal tendencies while alone, Crusoe maintains his humanity by establishing dominance over his...

Critics disagree about Robinson Crusoe’s religious convictions, but they generally concur that Crusoe’s faith begins when he acknowledges that his sins are a major cause of his island captivity. Beyond that, opinions diverge. Karl Marx writes that...

Christianity played a tremendous role in the 18th century European colonization of the New World, as exemplified by Robinson Crusoe. The story of Crusoe’s isolation on the island, especially concerning his “missionary” attempts with a savage named...

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe leaves home to see the world, only to find himself in a shipwreck, leaving him stranded on a deserted island for years, while Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko is a royal prince turned slave who meets his ultimate demise in the...

In Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, appropriately titled after its main character, young Robinson is a middle-class man in search of a career. Though pressed by his family to study Law, Robinson yearns for oceanic adventure, longing to escape to a...