Topographies of the Imagination
New Approaches to Daniel Defoe
Edited by
Katherine Ellison, Kit Kincade, and Holly Faith Nelson
LC, CIP
ISBN-10: 0-404-64869-X
ISBN-13: 978-0-404-64869-5
Cloth
$115.00
AMS Studies in the Eighteenth Century, No. 69
Topographies of the Imagination traces not only the diverse contours of Defoe’s creative intellect but also the ways in which general readers, literary critics, and even editors have interpreted and fashioned multiple Defoes across time and space. To study and write on the works of Defoe is to recognize at once his significance and elusiveness, the importance of his body of works and the evolving nature of his canon. In this collection, Defoe inspires scholars to think meta-biographically and meta-textually even as they appreciate Defoe’s life and work on their own terms, a task that necessitates inhabiting a complex and sometimes paradoxical critical space, one that resists simple interpretive binaries.
This collection is something of a microcosm of what the most recent decades of scholarship in Defoe studies represent: the upsurge of a wide variety of theoretical and critical approaches to the life and writings of Defoe, which has led to the exploration of many previously unexamined aspects of his works and to the interrogation of standard interpretations of his texts.
CONTENTS
Katherine Ellison, Kit Kincade, and Holly Faith Nelson, “Mapping Defoe Studies: An Introduction”
(Re)contouring the Novel
Geoffrey Sill, “Daniel Defoe and the Sentimental Novel”
John Richetti, “Second (and Third) Chances for Defoe’s Fictional Protagonists: Recovery and Realism”
Elizabeth Zold, “Robinson Crusoe in World War II America: Gustaf Tenggren’s Adaptation of Defovian Fiction for Children”
Negotiating Rational and Supernatural Terrain
Maximillian E. Novak, “Daniel Defoe in the Footsteps of the Goddess of Reason”
Riccardo Capoferro, “Defoe, the Supernatural, and the Origins of the Fantastic”
Katherine Ellison, “Mediation and Intelligence in Defoe’s Vision of the Angelic World”
Kit Kincade, “Editing Defoe: A System of Magick as a Case Study”
Demarking and Dismantling Place
Jess Edwards, “Daniel Defoe and Atlas Maritimus & Commercialis”
David Alff, “Unearthing a ‘Universal Correspondence’: Defoe’s Roman Roads Project”
Lora E. Geriguis, “‘A Vast Howling Wilderness’: The Persistence of Space and Placelessness in Daniel Defoe’s Captain Singleton”
Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson, “(Re)writing Spaces of War: Daniel Defoe and Early Modern Siege Narratives ”
Navigating Sexual and Party Politics
Stephen H. Gregg, “Defoe’s ‘Horse-rhetorick’: Human Animals and Gender”
Christopher Borsing, “The True-Born Englishman: Defoe’s Hall of Mirrors”
Andreas K. E. Mueller, “‘One of the greatest puzzles in Defoe bibliography’: John Toland, Daniel Defoe, and Ennobling Foreigners ”
Index
Category: Annuals