Defoe's Tour and Early Modern Britain: Panorama of the Nation

Description

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.

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).

A major work of scholarship by one of our most eminent and erudite authorities on eighteenth-century literature. Defoe's Tour and Early Modern Britain displays Pat Rogers's unparalleled knowledge of Defoe and his world. Nobody else could have written this book. It is the result of a lifetime of research, an enthusiastic celebration of Defoe's singular achievement in writing A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain. There is something surprising and edifying to learn on every page, for novice and expert readers alike. It will remain a landmark in Defoe scholarship for years to come. Joseph Hone, Newcastle University In a career spanning over fifty years, Pat Rogers has produced a body of scholarship of lasting value, erudite, historically informed, and, above all, well-written. Defoe's Tour and Early Modern Britain adds a distinguished chapter to this long history of scholarly excellence. This is Rogers at his best, analysing historical and textual evidence with elegance and wit. Approaching the Tour from various points of interest, Rogers gives us the definitive critical account of Defoe's topographical masterpiece for our time as we mark the tercentenary of its publication. Albert Rivero, Marquette University