The King of Pirates - Couverture souple

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1410210472 ISBN 13 : 9781410210470

Editeur : University Press of the Pacific, 2003

Synopsis

This volume presents seven short stories of pirates and robbers, all published originally during the busy years in which Defoe's work as a novelist was done. They were, no doubt, thrown off in haste by a busy writer, and they do not rank with his masterpieces; yet they exhibit the same powers, and they deserve to be known. Contents: Introduction The King of Pirates: Captain Avery The Cartoucheans in France The History of the Remarkable Life of John Sheppard A Narrative of All the Robberies, Escapes, &c., of John Sheppard The Life and Actions of Jonathan Wild The Adventures of Captain John Gow Lives of Six Notorious Street-Robbers

A propos du livre

Biographie de l'auteur

Born in London in 1661, the son of a butcher and tallow chandler, Daniel Defoe is widely considered the first English novelist. Educated at a dissenting school and intended for the Presbyterian Church, Defoe instead embarked on a career in trade, travelling to France, Spain, and Holland as a hosiery merchant and tile manufacturer. This venture ended in bankruptcy in 1691, by which time he had already begun writing political tracts. He worked as an agent for William III, and his myriad pamphlets, tracts and works of journalism indicate his capacity to elaborate satirically or otherwise the full spectrum of political and social perspectives. Defoe was in fact imprisoned in 1703 for a tract that attacked Dissenters. He was then employed by the Tory politician, Robert Harley, as a secret agent to gauge public opinion, and concurrently wrote a thrice-weekly newspaper called The Review almost singlehandedly.
Contentious pamphlets led to a second prison sentence in 1713, and only political manoeuvres enabled him to escape a sentence for libel in 1715.
In 1719, the seemingly autobiographical novel, Robinson Crusoe, appeared: a book that has influenced generations of readers, authors such as Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, and J.M. Coetzee, and many film-makers. Further works of fiction followed, including Moll Flanders (1722), Journal of the Plague Year (1722), and Roxana (1724), all purportedly firsthand accounts of extraordinary lives. These powerful narratives in plain prose are the most famous works by a prolific writer whose vast and varied output encompassed history, biography, crime and travel writing. Defoe died in 1731, his contribution to the evolution of the English novel one aspect only of his extraordinary literary legacy.

Présentation de l'éditeur

ONE of the particular Advantages of the following Letters from Captain Avery, is, the Satisfaction they will give the Readers how much they have been impos’d upon in the former ridiculous and extravagant Accounts which have been put upon the World in what has been publish’d already. It has been enough to the Writers of this Man’s Life, as they call it, that they could put any Thing together, to make a kind of monstrous unheard of Story, as romantick as the Reports that have been spread about of him; and the more those Stories appear’d monstrous and incredible, the more suitable they seem’d to be to what the World would have been made to expect of Captain Avery. There is always a great Deference between what Men say of themselves, and what others say for them, when they come to write Historically of the Transactions of their Lives.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University Press of the Pacific
• Date d'édition: 2003
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1410210472
• ISBN 13: 9781410210470
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 408
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Buchpark GmbH; https://www.buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Allemagne