Defoe's Politics: Parliament, Power, Kingship and 'Robinson Crusoe'

by Manuel Schonhorn

Overview

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 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. The model illuminates his original reading of 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 life-long political preoccupations concerning society, government and kingship.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521029025
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/02/2006
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought , #9
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.47(d)

Table of Contents

Preface and acknowledgments; A note on attributions; List of abbreviations; Introduction; 1. Defoe, dissent and monarchy; 2. Defoe's Reflections Upon the Late Great Revolution and the political languages of 1689; 3. Defender of the king, 1689–1701; 4. From the death of William III to Jure Divino, 1702–1706; 5. Juro Divino; 6. The politics of Robinson Crusoe; Select bibliography; Index.