Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions

by Maximillian E. Novak

Daniel Defoe led an exciting and indeed precarious life. A provocative pamphleteer and journalist, a spy and double agent, a revolutionary and a dreamer, he was variously hunted by mobs with murderous intent and treated as a celebrity by the most powerful leaders of the country. Imprisoned many times, pilloried and reviled by his enemies, through it all he managed to produce some of the most significant literature of the eighteenth century.
Daniel Master of Fictions is the first biography to view Defoe's complex life through the angle of vision that is most important to us as modern readers--his career as a writer. Maximillian Novak, a leading authority on Defoe, ranges from the writer's earliest collection of brief stories, which he presented to his future wife under the sobriquet Bellmour, to his Compleat English Gentleman , left unpublished at his death. Novak illuminates such works as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders , novels that changed the course of fiction in their time and have remained towering classics to this day. And he reveals a writer who was a superb observer of his times--an age of dramatic historical, political, and social change. Indeed, through his many pamphlets, newspapers, books of travel, and works of fiction, Defoe commented on everything from birth control to the price of coal, and from flying machines to the dangers of the plague.
Beautifully and authoritatively written, this is the first serious, full-scale biography of Defoe to appear in a decade. It gives us, for the first time, a full understanding of the thought and personal experience that lie behind some of the great works of English literature.

Genres: History, Biography, Literary Criticism

776 pages, Paperback

First published July 19, 2001

About the author

University of California, Los Angeles, English, Faculty Member

Reviews

[Justin Evans · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was excited for this--Novak has written some really interesting articles on Defoe. Interesting, well-written, well-argued and so on.

This book... not so much. This is *strictly* an academic research tool. Novak is not, I suspect, much of a biographer at heart. He is, however, an excellent scholar of Defoe. So the structure of this book is, straightforwardly, a summary of Defoe's writings. All of them, from the most insignificant squib in defense of Whig principles, through to the late novels that give us a reason to care about Defoe any more than any of the other fairly generic Dissenting Whigs. And they all get more or less the same amount of attention. This is great if you're writing a dissertation on Defoe and don't want to read his collected works. This is not great if you want to learn about Defoe or his novels.

I wouldn't choose to write a biography this way, but I can see the value in it. But even that value is decreased somewhat by the impenetrable style of the book. Novak routinely names obscure eighteenth century men and events without introducing them or saying who/what they are. Since so much of Defoe's writing was occasional journalism, much of the book is a not very well organized look at minor, unimportant political/theological/economic scuffles. And I say this as a reader who's fascinated by 18th century English politics.

My reading of the book wasn't helped by the fact that Novak defends more or less everything Defoe said (when he does something truly and obviously objectionable, Novak will introduce the paragraph with 'It must be admitted that...'). I think Defoe was wrong in most of the debates he was a part of, and that his ideas, personality and actions were borderline repugnant.

So it's possible that someone who, like Novak, is more or less an 18th century Whig with low church sympathies and a love for trade and commerce would find more to like about this book than I did. And if you're a literature graduate student, even a non-Whiggish one, this is obviously a gold-mine that you should buy immediately. You just don't want to read it right through, trust me.