1.

Record Nr.

UNISA996248191803316

Autore

Schonhorn Manuel

Titolo

Defoe's politics : Parliament, power, kingship, and Robinson Crusoe / / Manuel Schonhorn [[electronic resource]]

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cambridge : , : Cambridge University Press, , 1991

ISBN

0-511-51910-9

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xiii, 174 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)

Collana

Cambridge studies in eighteenth-century English literature and thought ; ; 9

Disciplina

823.5

Soggetti

Politics and literature - Great Britain - History - 18th century

Political fiction, English - History and criticism

Great Britain Politics and government 1660-1714

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Sommario/riassunto

This study of Defoe's politics aims to challenge the critical demand to see Defoe as a 'modern' and to counter misrepresentations of his political writings by restoring them to their seventeenth-century context. Offering a full examination of Defoe's years as a political reporter and journalist (1689-1715), it recovers his traditional, conservative and anti-Lockean ideas on contemporary issues: the origins of society, the role of the people in the establishment of a political society and how monarchies are created and maintained as the means of achieving a beneficent political order. At the heart of Defoe's political imagination, Manuel Schonhorn finds the vision of a warrior-king, derived from sources in the Bible and in ancient and English history. This model illuminates his original reading of Defoe's greatest political fiction, Robinson Crusoe, which emerges less in terms of a family romance, a tract for the rising bourgeoisie or a Lockean parable of government, than as a dramatic re-enactment of Defoe's lifelong political preoccupations concerning society, government and kingship.