According to encyclopedia.com, Daniel Defoe was an English man born in the 1660’s, who later died in 1737. Defoe was a successful business man, pamphleteer, and novelist, whose work to this day, is still valued. Defoe began his career in business in the late 1680’s doing trade work, and selling ship insurance. However this didn’t last long, in 1692 Daniel Defoe had to declare bankruptcy which in essence led him into a new career path as a journalist. Defoe started doing literary work and writing
Defoe, Richardson, Fielding and the English Novel The roots of the novel extend as far back as the beginning of communication and language because the novel is a compilation of various elements that have evolved over the centuries. The birth of the English novel, however, can be centered on the work of three writers of the 18th century: Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) and Henry Fielding (1707-1754). Various critics have deemed both Defoe and Richardson the father of
the past twenty years. While the initial stages of, first, feminist and, later, post colonial perspectives may have sought only to insert marginalised texts into the existing literary discourse, their long term ramifications are obliging a wider analysis of how we approach the English novel and the manner in which we link it to its surrounding culture. Its exploration reveals the methods with which we trace our histories, what we choose to include and exclude the positions from which we do so. A