Daniel Defoe and early modern intelligence

1996 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula R. Backscheider
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Joseph Hone

Chapter 4 investigates how the War of the Spanish Succession was reconfigured as a War of the British Succession. During the early modern period, warfare provided a stimulus to imaginative writing. At the start of the eighteenth century, Britain’s new status as a military superpower profoundly affected literary culture. By examining a range of official, popular, and diplomatic responses of military victories, including poems by Joseph Addison, Nahum Tate, and Daniel Defoe, this chapter illuminates local partisan meanings in texts reacting to the war and succession crisis. Moving through popular news, court propaganda, panegyrics, and satires, it establishes how the war became a lens through which to view dynastic crisis.


2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (123) ◽  
pp. 151-172
Author(s):  
Knut Ove Eliassen

Early Romanticism established and developed a series of poetical maritime common places intended to convey the pure forceful and inhuman being of Nature. “Storm at Sea”, “The Endless Ocean” and “The monstrous deep” are but three of many topological variation of “The Ocean”, gaining widespread popularity in the 19th and the 20th centuries and gradually turning into cultural clichés. This article argues that the long history of maritime narratives contains a much richer and indeed both critical and instructive legacy of topological figures than the semantically rather limited legacy of Romantic poetry. Analyzing a wide range of examples spanning from Homer to Joseph Conrad by way of François Rabelais and Daniel Defoe, this article suggests that the topologies of maritime narratives are exemplary cases of what Mikhail M. Bakhtin called chrono-topes, that is, epistemologically and politically charged configuration of literary time-spaces. The ocean-spaces of the early modern sea narratives are explicitly informed by the technological and political realities of their times, thus yielding a rich material that reflects how our ways of experiencing the oceans cannot be separated from the protocols, tools and crafts that determines our interfaces with the world.


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