Theme 8: The Romantic Age in English Literature in xixth century Daniel Defoe (1660 1731) ”Robinson Crusoe”

Theme 8: The Romantic Age in English Literature in XIXth century
1.Daniel Defoe (1660 - 1731)
2.”Robinson Crusoe”
3. “The Education of Women”
4. Jonathan Swift
5.“Gulliver’s Travels”
Key words and expressions: Inevitability, Efficacy, Plentitude, Skepticism, Survival, Ignorance, Enlighten, Compromise, Age of Elegance, Prose, Speculation, Fierce, Ambitiously, Orthodox, Commercial, Ascendancy, Obtuse, Rank, Mysticism, Obscure, Exponent, Welter, Depth, Augustan of Age, Reign, Recapture, Enlightenment, Embrace, Appeal, Mock, Outstanding, Courageous, Regard, Profitable, Impertinence, Wit, Rejoice, Extravagance, Generosity, Benevolence.

Daniel Defoe is the founder of the early realistic novel (with all these earlier developments of the novel, it is left to the eighteenth century to consolidate fiction as a form of literature, and from that time onwards there has been no cessation in novel-writing). He was a journalist, and in many ways, the father of modern English periodicals. He founded and conducted the first English newspaper “The Review” (1704 - 1713).
Daniel Foe was born in 1660 in the family of James Foe, a London butcher. (When he was thirty-five years old he assumed the more high-sounding name Defoe). His father was wealthy enough to give his son a good education. Daniel was to become a priest, but when his training was completed, he decided to engage in business as a hosier. It was his cherished desire to become wealthy but his wish was never fulfilled. Defoe went bankrupt several times. He was always in debt. The only branch of business in which he proved successful was journalism and literature.
When Defoe was about 23, he started writing pamphlets. In his “Essays on Projects” Defoe expressed his views on the greatest public improvements of modern times: higher education for women, the protection of seamen, the construction of highways, and the opening of saving-banks. He drove on the establishment of a special academy to study literature and languages.
In 1701 Defoe wrote a satire in verse, “The True-born Englishman”. It was written against those, who declared that the English race should be kept pure. In the satire Defoe proved that true-born Englishmen did not exist, since the English nation consisted of Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans, and others.
In 1719, he tried his hand at another kind of literature - fiction, and wrote the novel “The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe”. After the book was published, Defoe became famous and rich. Now he wrote for four public magazines and received a regular sum of money from the government. Other novels which Defoe wrote were also very much talked about during his lifetime, but we do not hear much about them now. Defoe published “The Life of Captain Singleton” in 1720, a vivid tale with piracy and Africa as its background, “The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders” in 1722, the “female rogues”, “A Journal of the Plague Year” in 1722, and “A History of the Lady Roxana” in 1724.
In 1729, while at work on a book, which was to be, entitled “The Complete English Gentleman”, Defoe fell ill and in two years’ time he died.