Fall 2008

Daniel Defoe’s

Moll Flanders

 

Notes and Discussion Questions:

 

 

Critics of Defoe (and Moll Flanders in particular) often point to his rambling, poorly unified plots as a means of claiming that the text we have before is us not a novel, but a precursor to the novel.  As beginning students of British Literature, you may or may not have had access to the generic conventions of the novel, as a form. 

 

So what is a novel?  How is it a revolutionary or new kind of writing (Novel means new)? How is it differentiated from the kinds of prose that were written before Defoe, Richardson and Fielding?  To answer these questions, it may help you to do some web research on early novels.  Please contrast the use of the generic use of the word "novel" with terms such as Romance or Picaresque.

 

Web Research:  Please spend the first half of this class researching this debate.  Attempt to locate the various arguments about the origins of the novel and see if these issues are even relevant to us as readers and scholars of the novel.  Please locate three different web sites which help you to answer this question (and please don’t use just the first three sites you find).  Write a small research paragraph that summarizes the information that you found and email it to me as a word attachment.

 

Your subject line should read:   Name   Development of the Novel Research Block.