Affiliation:
1. English, Keele University
Abstract
Abstract
This chapter examines Daniel Defoe’s use of letters, both within printed works that adopt an epistolary format such as The Complete English Tradesman (1725–7) and his personal correspondence with politicians and other associates. The chapter reveals Defoe’s cultivation of what he understood to be a ‘plain’ prose style as a literary and ethical ideal. It thus explores Defoe’s self-fashioning as a plain-dealer in his letters by setting his epistolary corpus in the context of his political career. It appraises Defoe’s use of instructional letters to promote social values among ordinary readers. And it attends to Defoe’s use of the letter genre in polemical pamphlets, particularly those addressed to Dissenters. Finally, it analyses Defoe’s epistolary novel, A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy (1718), which operates as an instructional guide and as an exploration through letters of a complicated personal identity.
Reference12 articles.
1. Paula R. Backscheider, ‘Accounts of an Eyewitness: Defoe’s Dispatches from the Vale of Trade and the Edinburgh Parliament House’, in Sent as a Gift: Eight Correspondences from the Eighteenth Century, ed. Alan T. McKenzie (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 21–47.
2. John Russell to Daniel Defoe: Fifteen Unpublished Letters from Scotland;PQ,1982
3. Paula R. Backscheider, ‘Personality and Biblical Allusion in Defoe’s Letters’, South Atlantic Review, 47:1 (1982), 1–20.