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Almost three hundred years after its first publication, Roxana continues to challenge readers, who, though compelled by Roxana’s story, are often baffled by her complex relationships to her children, her fortune, and her vices. As one of Daniel Defoe’s four major fictions, Roxana has long been understood as central to the history of the novel,…

Long dismissed by critics as a novel of merely historical interest, Colonel Jack is one of Daniel Defoe’s most entertaining, revealing, and complex works. It is the supposed autobiography of an English gentleman who begins life as a child of the London streets. He and his brothers are brought up as pickpockets and highwaymen, but…

Following the success of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe wrote a new fiction, the story of an English pirate whose success eclipsed every buccaneer the Atlantic world had seen. Featuring a haunted, unreliable narrator, a daring trek across the continent of Africa, and mercantile adventures in the China Seas, Captain Singleton is a tale of loneliness,…

Robinson Crusoe is one of the most famous literary characters in history, and his story has spawned hundreds of retellings. Inspired by the life of Alexander Selkirk, a sailor who lived for several years on a Pacific island, the novel tells the story of Crusoe’s survival after shipwreck on an island, interaction with the mainland’s…

Robinson Crusoe is one of the most famous literary characters in history, and his story has spawned hundreds of retellings. Inspired by the life of Alexander Selkirk, a sailor who lived for several years on a Pacific island, the novel tells the story of Crusoe’s survival after shipwreck on an island, interaction with the mainland’s…

Born to a petty thief in London’s notorious Newgate prison and determined to make her way in a rapacious and materialistic society, Moll Flanders recounts the “fortunes and misfortunes” of her turbulent life in this 1722 novel. Though Moll Flanders was shaped by the conventions of criminal biography, Defoe also drew on other literary traditions…

This is the first ever critical edition of Penelope Aubin’s The Noble Slaves, a novel that shows women as both moral exemplars and independent adventurers in foreign lands. Its tales of seduction, imprisonment, and escape engage with contemporary debates about arbitrary authority and slavery—particularly in relation to the lives of women. In one brief and…

In 1716, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s husband Edward Montagu was appointed British ambassador to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire. Montagu accompanied her husband to Turkey and wrote an extraordinary series of letters that recorded her experiences as a traveller and her impressions of Ottoman culture and society. This Broadview edition includes a broad…

In all six of its volumes, The Broadview Anthology of British Literature presents British literature in a truly distinctive light. Fully grounded in sound literary and historical scholarship, the anthology takes a fresh approach to many canonical authors, and includes a wide selection of work by lesser-known writers. The anthology also provides wide-ranging coverage of…

When it first appeared in 1767, this novel was called a “sort of second Robinson Crusoe; full of wonders.” Indeed, The Female American is an adventure novel about an English protagonist shipwrecked on a deserted isle, where survival requires both individual ingenuity and careful negotiations with visiting local Indians. But what most distinguishes Winkfield’s novel…

This entertaining novel’s full title, which claims that it will show “All the Artifices and Strategems which the Ladies of Pleasure make use of for the Intreaguing and Decoying of Men,” suggests that it is a cautionary tale. And in fact, The London Jilt is presented as the memoir of a courtesan by an anonymous…

William Godwin was one of the most popular novelists of the Romantic era; P.B. Shelley praised him, Byron drew heavily on his narrative style, and Mary Shelley, Godwin’s daughter, dedicated Frankenstein to him. Caleb Williams is the riveting account of a young man whose curiosity leads him to pry into a murder from the past.…

“Benito Cereno,” a story of atmospheric Gothic horror and striking political resonance, represents Herman Melville’s most profound and unsettling engagement with the horrors of New World slavery. Narrating the story of a slave revolt using materials drawn from Amasa Delano’s non-fictional account of the Tryal Rebellion from earlier in the nineteenth century, Melville’s story probes…

The great-grandmother of Downton Abbey, Barford Abbey is among the first of a new genre of “abbey fictions.” Using the abbey as both a site and a question mark, Susannah Minifie Gunning weaves a story of new and broken relationships, of change and fear of change, and of heredity and inheritance. The abbey becomes not…

For more than two hundred years, Robinson Crusoe’s story was encountered by generations of readers as one text in two parts, such that the second novel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, constituted a clear continuation of the protagonist’s eventful life. In the first part of this sequel, Crusoe returns to his island to advise…

Mary Shelley’s third published novel, The Last Man, is a disillusioned vision of the end of civilization, set in the twenty-first century. The book offers a sweeping account of war, plague, love, and desolation. It is the sort of apocalyptic vision that was widespread at the time, though Shelley’s treatment of the theme goes beyond…

Eighteenth-century critics differed about almost everything, but if there was one point on which they almost universally agreed, it was that they were living through an age of extraordinary change. The texts in this collection respond to a series of fundamental questions about the changing nature of the literary field during a tumultuous age: What…

In London Labour and the London Poor (1861) Henry Mayhew wrote, “Of all books, perhaps none has ever had so baneful effect upon the young mind, taste, and principles” as Jack Sheppard. An historical novel based on the exploits of John Sheppard, a thief who was executed in 1724, Jack Sheppard was blamed for inciting…

The Broadview Anthology of British Satire, 1660–1750 provides instructors and students with a thorough introduction to the highpoint of British literary satire. Reflecting current pedagogical practice and scholarship, the anthology presents works by thirty satirists, including eleven women. The contents are expansive: they include canonical, frequently taught texts; less anthologized works by major satirists; and…

In 1754 the British adventurer, compiler, and novelist Edward Kimber published The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson. Rooted in a tale Kimber heard while exploring the Atlantic seaboard, Mr. Anderson is the novelist’s transatlantic tale of slavery, Indian relations, and frontier life. Having been kidnapped in England, transported across the Middle…