The Disputed Assignment Of Memoirs Of An English Officer To Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe was one of the most important and best-known writers of the eighteenth century but there is a feeling among scholars that the Defoe 'canon' is a remarkably strange and not very satisfactory construction. Between 1790, when the first bibliography of Defoe appeared, and 1971, when J.R. Moore published the second edition of his Checklist, the canon had swollen from just over a hundred items to 570. A large proportion of these attributions had been made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on the basis of features of style, 'favourite phrases' and resemblance to Defoe's known views. This book is a list of all the items in Moore's Checklist (the current authority on the Defoe canon) that at present the authors consider questionable with in each case a note as to who was the first attributer, a brief synopsis and an explanation of the reasons for doubting the ascription.

Paul Hopkins, an authority on early Jacobitism, sets the Massacre of Glencoe in its true context. The book describes the tensions in the Highlands between the Restoration and the End of the Revolution and the influence on the Highlands of national politics. Besides filling a blank in our knowledge of the Highlands in the decade following the Massacre, the book transforms our perspective on lowlands politics by showing that the Inquiry was part of a secret patriotic campaign to break the aristocracy's political stranglehold and increase the Scottish parliament's powers.

First published in 1985, Defoe’s Fiction explores Defoe’s work by considering it in the context of its genre. The book highlights the difficulty of placing Defoe’s fiction in the most appropriate context due to it being aimed primarily at a popular market, in contrast to the more literary productions of Pope, Swift, or Addison. It also comments on the trend of focusing on Defoe’s irony or emphasising his mimetic power. In doing so, it seeks to explain, rather than judge, Defoe’s achievement by looking at his whole body of work in the context of its genre. Defoe’s Fiction will appeal to those with an interest in Defoe, comparative literature, and the history of literary criticism.

Recent literary scholarship has seen a shift of interest away from questions of attribution. Yet these questions remain urgent and important for any historical study of writing, and have been given a powerful new impetus by advances in statistical studies of language and the coming on line of large databases of texts in machine-searchable form. The present book is the first comprehensive survey of the field from a literary perspective to appear for forty years. It covers both traditional and computer based approaches to attribution, and evaluates each in respect of their potentialities and limitations. It revisits a number of famous controversies, including those concerning the authorship of the Homeric poems, books from the Old and New Testaments, and the plays of Shakespeare. Written with wit as well as erudition Attributing Authorship will make this intriguing field accessible for students and scholars alike.