Defoe's Tour and Early Modern Britain

Pat Rogers is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, formerly Eminent Scholar, and DeBartolo Chair in the Liberal Arts at the University of South Florida. He has held fulltime teaching posts at the universities of Cambridge, London, Wales, and Bristol, and has published extensively on literature from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as teaching on courses up to the twentieth. His previous works on Defoe include The Text of Great Britain: Theme and Design in Defoe's Tour (1998); editions of the Tour (1971: 1989), Defoe: The Critical Heritage (1972), a study of Robinson Crusoe (1979), and an edition of Moll Flanders (1993). He is a contributor to the forthcoming collections The Oxford Handbook to Daniel Defoe and Defoe in Context (Cambridge).

• Introduction; Part 1. Form and Function: 1. The identity of Britain; 2. Embedding and embodying the nation: Textual practices and form in the Tour; 3. The epic strain; 4. The shape of the nation; Part 2. Time: 5. The role of the Tour in the historiography of early modern Britain; 6. The Jacobite rising in the Tour: Preventing the ruin of Scotland; 7. The impact of the bubble; 8. Local proverbs and folk wisdom; Part 3. Place: 9. The uses of topography; 10. Road-testing the first turnpikes: Defoe's account of English highways; 11. Defoe on Bristol: The text with an introduction and annotation; 12. Atlas Maritimus: The case for Defoe's authorship.

A major work of scholarship by one of our most eminent and erudite authorities on eighteenth-century literature. Defoe's Tour and Early Modern Britain displays Pat Rogers's unparalleled knowledge of Defoe and his world. Nobody else could have written this book. It is the result of a lifetime of research, an enthusiastic celebration of Defoe's singular achievement in writing A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain. There is something surprising and edifying to learn on every page, for novice and expert readers alike. It will remain a landmark in Defoe scholarship for years to come. Joseph Hone, Newcastle University