The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe

Nicholas Seager is Professor of English Literature and Head of the School of Humanities at Keele University. He has published on literature of the long eighteenth century, including Bunyan, Swift, Defoe, Richardson, Johnson, Sterne, Goldsmith, and Austen. He is the editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Daniel Defoe (2022), and co-editor of The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction (2015) and The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver's Travels (2023). He has recently completed an edition of Defoe's The Fortunate Mistress for Oxford World's Classics.J. A. Downie is Emeritus Professor of English at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he was Dean of the Faculty of Arts from 1991 to 1995 and Pro-Warden (Academic) from 1995 to 2002. His books include Robert Harley and the Press (1979), Jonathan Swift, Political Writer (1984), To Settle the Succession of the State: Literature and Politics, 1678-1750 (1994), and A Political Biography of Henry Fielding (2009). He edited two volumes in the Pickering Masters edition of The Works of Daniel Defoe. He also edited of The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel (2016).

The book offers a summative report on the current state of Defoe studies while also elucidating future forms of inquiry in several different directions. The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe aptly demonstrates the range as well as the depth of understanding found in thismost prolific of literary authors.Indeed, due to Defoe's intimate acquaintance with and participation in most aspects of his world, the Handbook, while brilliantly illuminating Defoe, exhibits a panoramic primer of the late Restoration and early Augustan periods.

• 1: Brian Cowan: Defoe's Life and Times Part I. Genres 2: Maximillian E. Novak: Defoe's Poetry 3: Geoffrey Sill: Defoe, Prose Fiction, and the Novel 4: Cynthia Wall: Defoe and Drama 5: Penny Pritchard: Dialogue and Didacticism: Defoe's Conduct and Advice Literature 6: Jeffrey Hopes: The Great Polemicist: Defoe's Pamphlets and Tracts 7: Ashley Marshall: Defoe's Periodical Journalism 8: Paul Baines: Defoe and the Idea of Travel 9: Rebecca Bullard: Defoe as Historian 10: Marc Mierowsky: The Style of Defoe's Correspondence 11: Joseph Hone: Defoe and Satire Part II. Contexts 12: Pat Rogers: Defoe and the Book Trade 13: J. A. Downie: Daniel Defoe and the Social Structure of Pre-Industrial England 14: Nicholas Seager: Defoe and Economics: Industry, Trade, and Finance 15: Paula R. Backscheider: Gender, Sexuality, and the Status of Women in Defoe's Writings 16: Liz Bellamy: Family and Domesticity in Defoe's Writings 17: David Walker: Defoe and Christianity 18: John Richetti: Defoe, Philosophy, and Religion 19: Christopher F. Loar: Defoe, Science, and Technology 20: D. W. Hayton: Defoe and Government: Propaganda and Principle 21: Katherine Ellison: Intelligence, Espionage, and the Ethics of Surveillance in Defoe's Writings 22: Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson: Defoe and War 23: Kate Loveman: Crime and the Law in Defoe's Works 24: Srividhya Swaminathan: Racial and National Identities in Defoe's Writings 25: Lucinda Cole: Defoe and Ecology Part III. Places 26: Brean S. Hammond: Defoe and London 27: Adam Sills: Defoe and Britain 28: Andreas K. E. Mueller: Defoe's Europe: Allies and Enemies 29: Markman Ellis: Defoe and Colonialism 30: Robert Markley: Defoe and the Pacific 31: Rebekah Mitsein and Manushag N. Powell: Africa and the Levant in Defoe's Writings Part IV. Afterlives 32: Nicholas Seager: The Celebrated Daniel De Foe: Publication History, 1731-1945 33: Kit Kincade: Defoe's Critical Reception, 1731-1945 34: Benjamin F. Pauley: Attribution and the Defoe Canon 35: Rivka Swenson: Habits of Gender and Genre in Three Female Robinsonades, 1767-1985 36: Robert Mayer: Defoe on Screen: Robinson Crusoe, The Red Turtle, and Animal Rights