Scarica Daniel Defoe: Life & Works & Other Works e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! INTRODUCTION Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), a prolific journalist and writer, is considered one of the pioneers of the modern novel. A perfect representative of the rising bourgeoisie, he expressed the values of resourcefulness and optimistic industriousness in simple language that adhered to reality. PERSONAL LIFE & WORKS He was born in London into a Protestant Presbyterian family and had a very strict religious upbringing. He studied for a few years at Dissenter's College in Stoke Newington, then went into commerce, often with projects that ended in financial disaster. In 1701 he published the verse satire The true born Englishman, in which he legitimized the accession of Dutch King William of Orange to the English throne, arguing for the composite origin of the English people themselves. In 1702 he published The shortest way with the dissenters, a pamphlet in which his apparent support for harsh measures against dissenters actually masked an attack on the Anglican Tories' attitude of religious intolerance. Because of this work Defoe was accused of sedition and imprisoned. Freed by influential politician Robert Harley, a moderate Tory, he began a career as a journalist and secret agent for the government. He founded the periodical "The Review" (The Review, 1704-1713), in which he covered topics such as trade, money, taxes, and freedom of the press. From the outset, however, he realized that in order to attract the attention of a wide audience, it was necessary to cover lighter topics, so he created a section in the journal in which the observation of contemporary facts, news and books served as a cue for him to write numerous essays on the customs of the time, becoming the most important predecessor of Addison and Steele's journalism. In 1706, with his realistic account of a supernatural event, A true relation of the apparition of one Mrs. Veal, Defoe first revealed his gifts as a storyteller. At the age of nearly sixty he decided to devote himself to the novel and wrote the series of his masterpieces. During the last years of his life he returned to social, political and economic problems in such works as The complete English tradesman (The perfect English merchant, 1726-27) and A tour through the whole island of Great Britain (A tour through the island of Great Britain, 1724- 27), religion and occultism. He died while working on a new draft of The complete English gentleman. OTHER WORKS Defoe wrote his first novel, The life and strange surprising adventures of Robinson Crusoe, in 1719. The work is based in part on a news fact: the adventures of Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, who lived completely alone on a deserted island for four years. Enriching this fact with material from travel books and with inventions of his own, Defoe tells, in the first person, the story of an English merchant who, in order to escape a mediocre life, sets out to sea to seek his fortune and is shipwrecked on a desert island. In that isolation,
