Daniel Defoe is one of the few popular writers of the early eighteenth century still to be widely read today. In contrast to the more literary productions of Pope, Swift or Addison, his work was always aimed explicitly at a popular market. This has posed problems for his critics, who have found difficulty in trying to place his fiction in its most appropriate context. Recently it has been fashionable to stress his irony, or alternatively to emphasise his mimetic powers. "Defoe's Fiction" aims to overturn both these simplistic notions, and by considering Defoe's whole oeuvre in the context of its genre to explain rather than judge his achievement.
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