Moll Flanders

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Defoe
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Title Page ◽  
Adoptive Family ◽  
Moll Flanders ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

‘Twelve Year a Whore, fives times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv'd Honest, and died a Penitent’: so the title page of this extraordinary novel describes the career of the woman known as Moll Flanders, whose real name we never discover. And so, in a tour-de-force of writing by the businessman, political satirist, and spy Daniel Defoe, Moll tells her own story, a vivid and racy tale of a woman's experience in the seamy side of life in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England and America. Born in Newgate prison, and seduced in the home of her adoptive family, she learns to live off her wits, defying the traditional depiction of women as helpless victims. First published in 1722, and one of the earliest novels in the English language, its account of opportunism, endurance, and survival speaks as strongly to us today as it did to its original readers.

‘Poor Protestant Flies’: Conversions to Catholicism in Early Eighteenth Century England

1978 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 289-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eamon Duffy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
The Press ◽  
History Of ◽  
Roast Beef ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Popish Plot

Through the stormy and divided history of religion in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century England runs one constant and unvarying stream—hatred and fear of popery. That ‘gross and cruel superstition’ haunted the protestant imagination. The murderous paranoia of the popish plot was the last occasion on which catholic blood was spilled in the service of the national obsession, but the need to preserve ‘our Country from Papal Tyranny; our Laws, our Estates, our Liberties from Papal Invasion; our Lives from Papal Persecution; and our Souls from Papal Superstition . . .’ continued to exercise men of every shade of churchmanship, and of none. Throughout the early eighteenth century zealous churchmen sought to keep alive ‘the Spirit of Aversion to Popery whereby the Protestant Religion hath been chiefly supported among us’, and publications poured from the press reminding men of the barbarities of the papists, ancient and modern, the fires of Smithfield and the headman’s axe of Thorn. Catholicism was bloody, tyrannical, enslaving, and cant phrases rolled pat from tongue and pen—popery and arbitrary government, popery and wooden shoes. The tradition was universal, as integral a part of the nation’s self-awareness as beer and roast-beef, and equally above reason. There were, observed Daniel Defoe, ‘ten thousand stout fellows that would spend the last drop of their blood against Popery that do not know whether it be a man or a horse’.

scholarly journals Refocusing the Gendered Gaze

2010 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. Murray
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Gender Ideology ◽  
Object Relation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Economic Individualism ◽  
Dominant Ideologies ◽  
Moll Flanders ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Gendered Gaze

Daniel Defoe makes use of subject-object patterns within his novel Moll Flanders in order to produce ruptures within eighteenth-century gender ideology and to reconstitute the subject-object relation between masculine and feminine within the novel. Even as Defoe affirms the dominance of gender ideology by positioning his readers as objects of the novel, Defoe uses his character of Moll Flanders to suggest the potential for transforming ideology through the performative act of gender. As Moll struggles to link fragments of her past, she explores the boundaries of gender identity and transgresses their limits in order to achieve movement within eighteenth century society. How Moll negotiates her conceptions and interpretations of her relation to her natural, cultural, and psychological landscapes suggests her success in tracing the presence of an identity that would inform and sustain the self by allowing her to assert a sense of economic individualism, which might release her from any moral obligation to the pervasive and dominant ideologies affecting gender in the eighteenth century.

Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Hone
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Alexander Pope ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Joseph Addison ◽  
Nahum Tate ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Generation ◽  
First Time

This book is the first detailed study of the final Stuart succession crisis. It demonstrates for the first time the centrality of debates about royal succession to the literature and political culture of the early eighteenth century. Using previously neglected, misunderstood, and newly discovered material, it shows that arguments about Anne’s right to the throne were crucial to the construction of nascent party political identities. Literary texts were the principal vehicle through which contemporaries debated the new queen’s legitimacy. This book sheds fresh light on canonical authors such as Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, and Joseph Addison by setting their writing alongside the work of lesser known but nonetheless important figures such as John Tutchin, William Pittis, Nahum Tate, John Dennis, Henry Sacheverell, Charles Leslie, and other anonymous and pseudonymous authors. Through close historical readings, it shows how this new generation of poets, preachers, and pamphleteers transformed older models of succession writing by Milton, Dryden, and others, and imbued conventional genres such as panegyric and satire with their own distinctive poetics. By immersing the major authors in their milieu, and reconstructing the political and material contexts in which those authors wrote, this book demonstrates the vitality of debates about royal succession in early eighteenth-century culture.

Generating Captain Cook and Paul Kane into Published Authors: Case Studies of a Book History Model for Exploration and Travel Writing (pp 7-56)

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian MacLaren
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
English Language ◽  
Book History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

As more and more research occurs into published English-language travel literature, the production of individual texts, rather than their authorship alone, demands attention. Both the unreliability of the text as entirely the traveller's or explorer's own and the question of whether or not the text narrates only his own experience and observations have made problematical the matter of interpretation. Recently, Percy G. Adams has shown in Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (1983) how, because travel writing issued often enough from writers who did no more than move around in an armchair, this genre and the novel grew indistinguishable for a time in the early eighteenth century. From then on, travel literature would often exemplify a more complex, or at least less straightforward, relation between experience and language than one might expect.

Liberty, Manners, and Politeness in Early Eighteenth-Century England

1989 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 583-605 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence E. Klein
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
English Language ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Polite Society ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Aesthetic Standard ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

In the early eighteenth century, the language of politeness became a major fixture of English discourse. Centring on the term ‘politeness’ and consisting of a vocabulary of key words (such as ‘refinement’, ‘manners’, ‘character’, ‘breeding’, and ‘civility’) and a range of qualifying attributes (‘free’, ‘easy’, ‘natural’, ‘graceful’, and many others), the language was used to make a wide range of objects intelligible. Though the word ‘polite’ had been in the English language from at least the fifteenth century, denoting the state of being polished or neat in quite literal and concrete ways, the term entered on its significant career only in the mid-seventeenth century, when it began to convey the meanings of studied social behaviour of the sort inspired by and associated with princely courts. However, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, ‘politeness’ grew to cover a range of meanings, considerably freed from the initial association with courts. Several broad categories of usage of the term ‘polite’ are indicative: as a behavioural and moral standard for members of an elite (e.g. ‘polite gentlemen’, ‘polite ladies’, ‘polite society’, ‘polite conversation’); as an aesthetic standard for many kinds of human artifacts and products (e.g. ‘polite arts’, ‘polite towns’, ‘polite learning’, ‘polite buildings’); and as a way of generalizing about and characterizing society and culture (‘polite age’, ‘polite nation’, ‘polite people’). In the latter usage, ‘politeness’ was frequently deployed retrospectively as an attribute of classical civilizations. ‘Politeness’ helped recast the renaissance model of history, in which modernity was separated from its true ancestor, the ancient world, by the vast dark gulf of the middle ages: the ‘politest’ nations were ancient Greece and ancient Rome; the ‘politest’ ages, the spells of Hellenic and Roman creativity.

scholarly journals Snapshot or Signpost? The Role of English in Tadhg Ó Neachtain’s Early Eighteenth-Century Manuscripts

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 29-46
Author(s):  
Liam Mac Mathúna ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Code Mixing ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

Seán Ó Neachtain (c. 1640–1729) and his son Tadhg (c. 1671–c. 1752) were at the centre of an extensive circle of Gaelic scholars in the city of Dublin in the early part of the eighteenth century. Seán Ó Neachtain composed a broad range of creative literature. Although primarily written in Irish, his works include examples of Irish/English code-mixing as well as pieces composed entirely in English. His son, Tadhg Ó Neachtain, is credited with having written over 25 surviving manuscripts. He makes considerable use of English sources and of English itself in a number of these manuscripts, which are either pedagogical in nature, devoted to geography and history, or are characterised by frequent commonplace entries referring to contemporary events. This paper examines the interaction of the two languages in these manuscripts, exploring (1) the use of English language sources (textbooks and Dublin newspapers), (2) the content of the English portions of the manuscripts in question, and (3) the relationship of the English material to the Irish in the immediate compositional context. The paper seeks to assess whether the permeating bilingualism of these manuscripts is merely indicative of the contemporary socio-linguistic milieu in which the Ó Neachtains functioned, or can be regarded as harbinger of the subsequent community language change from Irish to English.

scholarly journals The Famous Dictionary of the Eighteenth Century

1930 ◽  
Vol 4 (5) ◽  
pp. 16-18
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
Title Page ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
History Of

The volumes are ponderous. The title-page in sonorous and dignified language informs one that this is “A Dictionary of the English Language in which the WORDS are deduced from their ORIGINALS, and illustrated in their different significations by examples from the best writers, to which are prefixed, a history of the language, and an English grammar. By Samuel Johnson, A.M. In Two Volumes.” The page is then topped off in good Johnsonian style with a nine-line Latin quotation from Horace.

scholarly journals The Inner Quandary of Woman in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 46-49
Author(s):  
T R Deepak
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Female Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
Moll Flanders ◽  
Feminist Movements ◽  
Shed Light

Daniel Defoe is an enchanted incinerator of English literature sprung during the initial years of eighteenth century. His applauded Moll Flanders (1722) is professed as picaresque in literary vegetation. He has emotionally painted the commotion of a solitary, imprudent and prevalent female distinct against an inimical and droopy humanity. As a matter of datum, the female chief strolls into the alleyway of assorted catastrophes. She has borne the humanity either in an orthodox or warped mundane. All these archetypes of women have shed light in the fiction even before the initiation of feminist movements athwart the realm. These movements have engrossed the intellect of community and sedated as operational. At regular intervals, these have performed more elegant and redundant than being operative.Moll Flanders is not a typical incarnation of feminist thoughts. It has never strained to sketch an itinerary for the relegated female personality to outshine her eccentricity. Yet, it is indubitably pro-woman and reconnoiters a female character with the reputation of protagonist. The farsighted image of woman with grander tenets of empathy and sympathy is blossomed. In the contemporary habitat, the novel may not seem like far-reaching as it pushes the female lead to imitate and regret with ceaseless kinks and contraventions. But the novelist is ahead of his epoch in aiding his female protagonist to gallop and endure the probabilities amidst dejection and misfortunes. Hence, the research ornate has through an endeavour to enchant the inner quandary of woman in a masculine captivated sophistication with reference to Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders.

The Satire of Dissent

2019 ◽  
pp. 55-73
Author(s):  
George Southcombe
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
The Third ◽  
Specific Analysis ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

This chapter discusses the nonconformist contribution to satire from the Restoration of the monarchy to the early eighteenth century. The poetry of the Presbyterian Robert Wild, and particularly the work he produced on the imprisonment of Edmund Calamy in 1663, is analysed to show the perhaps surprising role played by bodily humour, scatology, and personal abuse in dissenting work. The continuation of this tradition is then traced through Andrew Marvell’s Advice-to-a-Painter poems, and a specific analysis is offered of the influence of Wild’s poetry on the Duchess of Albemarle’s speech in The Third Advice to a Painter. Finally, the ways in which Daniel Defoe participated in and shaped this tradition in his works on dissent are examined. The chapter ends by suggesting the reasons why the extent of the nonconformist engagement with satire has been forgotten, and more generally why dissent is not often now associated with laughter.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document