Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions

Professor Maximillian E. Novak is Professor of English Literature at UCLA. He obtained his D.Phil from Oxford in 1961 and his interests include Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature; the Novel; Jewish-American Literature, Libertinism, Restoration Drama, the rise of the novel, primitivism, sensibility, madness, painting and the novel, the Gothic novel, Jewish-American writing of the immigrant period and after 1930

• List of Illustrations ; Abbreviations ; Preface ; 1. After the Revolution ; 2. The education of a Dissenter ; 3. Meditation of matters spiritual and secular ; 4. Marriage and rebellion ; 5. Financial woes and recovery ; 6. Propagandist for William III ; 7. The True-Born Englishman and other satires ; 8. An age of plot and deceit ; 9. From pilloried libeller to Government propagandist ; 10. 'Writing history sheet by sheet': Defoe, The Review ; 11. From public journalist to lunar philosopher ; 12. Defoe as spy and Whig propagandist ; 13. A 'true spy' in Scotland ; 14. In limbo between causes and masters ; 15. Journalism and history in 'an age of mysteries and paradoxes' ; 16. How to sell out while keeping one's integrity (somewhat) intact in that 'Lunatick Age' ; 17. These dangerous times ; 18. 'A miserable divided nation' ; 19. A change of monarchs ; 20. Times when honest men must reserve themselves for better fortunes ; 21. Corrector general of the press ; 22. The year before Robinson Crusoe: intellectual controversies and experiments in fiction ; 23. Robinson Crusoe and the variability of life ; 24. After Crusoe: pirate adventures, military memoirs, and the South Sea scandal ; 25. Creating fictional worlds ; 26. Describing Britain in the 1720s ; 27. Enter Henry Baker ; 28. Last productive years ; 29. Sinking under the weight of affliction ; Works cited ; Index

A finely tuned portrait of an ambitious man often living against the flow of his world.