Moll Flanders is one of the best-selling novels of all time. This Norton Critical Edition is again based on the first edition text (1722), the only text known to be Defoe's own. It is accompanied by detailed explanatory annotations and the editor's essay outlining the novel's textual history.
"Contexts" collects related documents on criminal transport, contemporary accounts of lives of crime, and colonial laws as they applied to servants, slaves, and runaways.
"Criticism" includes eleven interpretations by Juliet McMaster, Everett Zimmerman, Maximillian E. Novak, Henry Knight Miller, Ian A. Bell, Carol Kay, Paula B. Backscheider, John Rietz, Ann Louise Kibbie, John Richetti, and Ellen Pollak.
A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.
About the series: No other series of classic texts equals the caliber of the Norton Critical Editions. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with the comprehensive pedagogical apparatus necessary to appreciate the work fully. Careful editing, first-rate translation, and thorough explanatory annotations allow each text to meet the highest literary standards while remaining accessible to students. Each edition is printed on acid-free paper and every text in the series remains in print. Norton Critical Editions are the choice for excellence in scholarship for students at more than 2,000 universities worldwide.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0
strange ways:
If the underworld and the criminal mind interests you then read it. Strangeways is a hard time prison in England. Moll reads like something from there. It reminded me a bit of Genet's autoboigraphy as a homosexual and pick pocket. Yick. Moll is obviously a cover for Defoe's tentative homosexuality. Its not well suppressed like in Robinson Crusoe with his wonder Man Friday. It gets to be obvious and in the way like a sore thumb especially when you read these books together. Yuck. But there are those... more info
Give me not Poverty, lest I steal:
This human portrait of a woman is also an excellent sketch of the living conditions and the social stratification in England in the 18th century: 'the Age is so wicked and the Sex so Debauch'd'.
It shows the immense chasm between a small class of wealthy people and the rest (Swift: a thousand to one). The latter were struggling for sheer survival and praying 'Give me not Poverty, lest I steal' ... to be hanged: 'If I swing by the String, I shall hear the Bell ring, and then there's an End of poor... more info
Dust off this musty book for some good social critique:
Moll Flanders is a typical 18th Century book that one would read in a class about early English novels. Daniel Defoe's so-called `masterpiece' gets labeled sometimes as one of the first novels ever written, and sometimes the prose shows. Written from the first-person perspective of the title character, Moll
Flanders tells the tale of a poor social low-life who has to turn to a life of crime after five failed marriages. Readers receive a rambling narrative of colorful characters that reside in the... more info
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