Read more
Authoritative yet accessible, this is the first-ever comprehensive account of a true landmark in eighteenth-century travel writing. Daniel Defoe's Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain is constantly cited even now by students in practically every branch of history, and there are few topics essential to our understanding of the nation in the early modern period that do not show up in its pages. Historians since the late nineteenth century have looked to the Tour as one of the richest and most insightful works describing Britain in the lead-up to the Industrial Revolution, and critics and biographers of Defoe have regularly named it as among his most characteristic and central works. Indispensable for virtually any interdisciplinary approach to the nation in this period, this new study provides wide-reaching, up-to-date analysis of the content of the Tour, and of its methods, sources, form, and vast historical significance.
List of contents
Introduction; Part 1. Form and Function: 1. The identity of Britain; 2. Embedding and embodying the nation: Textual practices and form in the Tour; 3. The epic strain; 4. The shape of the nation; Part 2. Time: 5. The role of the Tour in the historiography of early modern Britain; 6. The Jacobite rising in the Tour: Preventing the ruin of Scotland; 7. The impact of the bubble; 8. Local proverbs and folk wisdom; Part 3. Place: 9. The uses of topography; 10. Road-testing the first turnpikes: Defoe's account of English highways; 11. Defoe on Bristol: The text with an introduction and annotation; 12. Atlas Maritimus: The case for Defoe's authorship.
About the author
Pat Rogers is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, formerly Eminent Scholar, and DeBartolo Chair in the Liberal Arts at the University of South Florida. He has held fulltime teaching posts at the universities of Cambridge, London, Wales, and Bristol, and has published extensively on literature from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as teaching on courses up to the twentieth. His previous works on Defoe include The Text of Great Britain: Theme and Design in Defoe's Tour (1998); editions of the Tour (1971: 1989), Defoe: The Critical Heritage (1972), a study of Robinson Crusoe (1979), and an edition of Moll Flanders (1993). He is a contributor to the forthcoming collections The Oxford Handbook to Daniel Defoe and Defoe in Context (Cambridge).
