features
Starting Out with Defoe in the 1950s
Maximillian E. Novak
"Who would have thought in the 1950s that in a Nobel Prize speech, a famous modern writer would take a section of Defoe’s Tour devoted to decoys or “duckoys” and make it into an example of the writer’s ability to observe life and to dramatize it in language, but that, of course, is exactly what J.M. Coetzee did a few years ago. And Defoe has continued to play a role in Coetzee’s writing from the depictions of isolation in South Africa, through Foe and into Elizabeth Costello." Read more . . .
Defoe's Review: Textual Editing and New Media
Christopher Flynn
"In the spring of 2004, with the Democratic primaries for the U.S. presidential election heating up, I came across a liberal political weblog with a wide readership, The DailyKos. As I played around with the site, visiting it for links to news I wasn’t finding elsewhere, reading conspiracy theories, watching videos of the Dean Scream and President Bush flipping off the camera in a well-known clip from when he was governor of Texas . . . " Read more . . .
"A Thousand Little Things": Seriality and the Dangers of Suspense in The Spectator and Moll Flanders
Lee Kahan
"Addison and Steele were not the only writers to question the motives behind seriality or to associate it with a potential decline in England’s mercantile spirit. While Daniel Defoe was an active participant in the news industry, he was also one of the most vocal proponents of home trade. In his periodicals he frequently expressed concerns that the business of false intelligence threatened . . . " Read more . . .
Father-Born: Mediating the Classics in J.M. Coetzee's Foe
Radhika Jones
"The canonical rewritings like Foe that have emerged in the last three decades are informed not only by their literary forebears but in a meta-literary fashion by the canon wars of the 1970s and '80s and the critical advances during that time in postcolonialism and gender studies." Read more . . .
A Strange Surprising Adventure: Curating the Defoe Exhibition for the Lilly Library
Denise Griggs
"The Defoe collection at the Lilly Library is the work of many years, although the majority of the books in the collection date from the residency of John Robert Moore. Moore was added to the Indiana University faculty in 1922, and by the early 1930s and through the end of his career (he retired from IU in 1961, although he continued to work until his death in 1973) he devoted. . . " Read more . . .
pedagogies
Benjamin Pauley
"For an author whose canon has been a matter of much speculation and debate, there appears to be a surprising level of de facto consensus about the body of Defoe’s work that bears teaching in university classrooms. Though by no means a rigorous measure, it is interesting to note that, while a Google search for “Defoe” and “syllabus” at the websites of US universities . . . " Read more . . .
First Encounters
The Turk's Encounter with Defoe
Beyazit H. Akman
"When I first encountered Daniel Defoe’s A Continuation of Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, I remember asking myself, 'What kind of bestial Turkish character is going to torture the Western protagonist, or how many harem girls will I find as the concubines of a ‘lustful’ Turk?' A title with a ‘Turk’ in it in British literature does not usually suggest anything positive about my culture or history." Read more . . .
Reviews
The Second Life of Daniel Defoe
Sharon Alker
"Many colleges and universities have now developed a presence on Second Life (SL), including Princeton University, University of Texas, University of Richmond, Georgia State University and others. The sciences and social sciences have taken the initiative in exploring the potential of a three-dimensional, participatory world, conducting experiments on cybersociality and building such spaces as virtual hospitals in which students can practice diagnosing medical conditions." Read more . . .
