Chapter Further Reading of Moll Flanders - Study Guide by Daniel Defoe

Further Reading

Backscheider, Paula, Daniel Defoe -His Life (1989, Baltimore) Although, unfortunately, written before Furbank and Owen's Critical Bibliography of Defoe, this remains the fullest and among the best of the biographies of Defoe. There is also a fairly comprehensive index, which is useful as the book is fairly thick (in terms of pages and detail).

Rogers, Pat (ed.), Defoe, The Critical Heritage (1972, London) is a good place to start to find contemporary and later criticism of Defoe. One problem is the volume of criticism devoted to Robinson Crusoe. This is all very well if you're not interested in the wealth of literature written by Defoe, but limiting if you look further than the most obvious of his works. Nonetheless, an interesting volume, with a useful introduction on the trends of criticism on Defoe from the eighteenth to the late twentieth century.

Furbank and Owens, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe and A Critical Bibliography of Defoe (London, 1998) Useful to know about even if you don't want to go to such depths of research, these volumes dispel myths about the (still impressive) size of the Defoe canon and give evidence for the authorship of the works which remain.

Richetti, J., Popular Fiction Before Richardson is a useful look at some of the contemporary writers mentioned in this guide.

Hunter, J. Paul, The Reluctant Pilgrim (Baltimore, 1966) Defoe's fiction in relation to spiritual autobiography is, perhaps, more useful for a study of Robinson Crusoe, but still contains useful arguments on Moll Flanders.

Starr, G., Defoe and Casuistry (XXXX) is an excellent attempt to see Defoe's fictions against the background of his beliefs and other writings, for example his work in The Review.

It is also worth looking at Ian Watts' The Rise of the Novel (London 1957), an article by Max Novak 'Defoe's Theory of Fiction' (Studies in Philology 61, 1964) and Literature and Popular Culture in 18th Century England by Pat Rogers (New Jersey, 1985).