Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Romancing the real: the “field” of criminal biography
- 2 Defoe's realism: rough frames, strange voices, surprisingly various subjects and readers made more present to themselves
- 3 The copious text: opening the door to inference, or, room for those who know how to read it
- 4 Intimations of an invisible hand: the mind exercised, enlarged, and kept in play by strange concurrences
- 5 The general scandal upon business: unanswerable doubts, and the text as a field supporting very nice distinctions
- 6 The frontiers of dishonesty, the addition and concurrence of circumstances: more on the strategic situating of names
- 7 Notions different from all the world: criminal stupidity, the self, and the symbolic order
- Closing comments: truth, complexity, common sense, and empty spaces
- Index
1 - Romancing the real: the “field” of criminal biography
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Romancing the real: the “field” of criminal biography
- 2 Defoe's realism: rough frames, strange voices, surprisingly various subjects and readers made more present to themselves
- 3 The copious text: opening the door to inference, or, room for those who know how to read it
- 4 Intimations of an invisible hand: the mind exercised, enlarged, and kept in play by strange concurrences
- 5 The general scandal upon business: unanswerable doubts, and the text as a field supporting very nice distinctions
- 6 The frontiers of dishonesty, the addition and concurrence of circumstances: more on the strategic situating of names
- 7 Notions different from all the world: criminal stupidity, the self, and the symbolic order
- Closing comments: truth, complexity, common sense, and empty spaces
- Index
Summary
It is something strange, that a Man's Life should be made a kind of a Romance before his Face, and while he was upon the Spot to contradict it; or, that the World should be so fond of a formal Chimney-corner Tale, that they had rather a Story should be made merry than true.
?Defoe, The Life and Actions of the Late Jonathan Wild (1725), p. [iii]As no person … perhaps, in any condition of life whatever had so many romantic stories fathered upon him in his life, or so many fictitious legendary accounts published of him after his death …. [i]t may seem a low kind of affectation to say that the memoirs we are now giving … are founded on certainty and fact.
Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals (1735), ed. Arthur L. Hayward (New York, 1927), p. 247Thus have we given the World a faithful account of this Poor Wretches Crime and Behaviour, and what she declared and persisted in to the last; with the great Remorse she expressed for all sin, and the mighty work of God upon her soul …. All which we leave to each Readers consideration and reflection, to Credit or Disbelieve her Asseverations, and make such judgment thereof as he shall think fit.
Warning for Servants … Or, the Case of Margret Clark, Lately Executed for Firing Her Master's House in Southwark (1680), pp. 30–1When a Man becomes remarkable in Life, though it be only on the Score of…
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- Crime and DefoeA New Kind of Writing, pp. 1 - 31Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993