The Story Of Daniel Defoe

‘I am singled out and separated, as it were, from all the world, to be miserable.’ 

So records Robinson Crusoe in what is arguably the first English novel. An individual’s struggle against circumstances, fate and even their own nature forms a recurrent pattern in many of the English novels that were to follow over the next 300 years.

Beginning with the story of Daniel Defoe’s remarkable career, we shall study:

·        Robinson Crusoe (1721) by Daniel Defoe

·        Jude the Obscure  (1895)   by Thomas Hardy

·        Shuggie Bain (2020) by Douglas Stuart

TERM 2- spring

We shall begin this term by asking, what is a novel? Does Defoe’s account of events that took place many years before he wrote Journal of the Plague Year  constitute the first historical novel?

·        Journal of the Plague Year (1722) by Daniel Defoe

·        The Long Song (2010) by Andrea Levy

·        The Noise of Time (2016) by Julian Barnes