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Roxana

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,…

Colonel Jack

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…

Robinson Crusoe

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…

Moll Flanders

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…

Robinson Crusoe, Modernized Edition

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…

Captain Singleton

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 reviewed in Digital Defoe

The Broadview edition of Robinson Crusoe, edited by Evan R. Davis, was recently reviewed by Benjamin F. Pauley (Eastern Connecticut State University) in Digital Defoe. Read the full review here and look for more information on this edition on the Broadview website.

The Noble Slaves

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…

“another claimant for the … discovery of the sources of the White Nile”: Captain Singleton and Geographers Gone Wrong

[Manushag Powell, editor of the Broadview edition of Captain Singleton, shares a piece of history on the imagined African geography of Singleton and the reception of the novel and its cartography the 19th century.] One of the main points of interest in Daniel Defoe’s piratical Captain Singleton (1720) is its extensive description of an east-to-west…

Restoration and 18th-Century Literature

RESTORATION AND 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader (1660s) Bell in Campo and The Sociable Companions (1662) Margaret Cavendish Sociable Letters (1664) Margaret Cavendish The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (1666) Margaret Cavendish Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668) Margaret Cavendish The Rover, second edition (1677) Aphra Behn Oroonoko (1688)…

The Broadview British Bookshelf

The Broadview British Bookshelf provides digital access to over 330 meticulously edited works of British Literature. Broadview’s editions present classic works of literature, both canonical and lesser-known, in a reader-friendly format with scholarly introductions, footnotes, and appendices to situate the work in its historical and cultural moment. “The Broadview series is not just great for…

The London Jilt

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…

Caleb Williams

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.…

The Female American – Second Edition

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…

The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson

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…

The Last Man

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…

Speaking of Writing: A Brief Rhetoric – with MLA 2021 Update

Co-authored by a novelist and a scholar, Speaking of Writing follows four college students from diverse backgrounds as they face the challenges of reading, writing, and critical thinking in first-year composition classes and across the disciplines. Each chapter engages students in relatable, often humorous scenarios that focus on key challenges. Through its story-based approach, this…

The Broadview Anthology of British Satire, 1660-1750

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…

Barford Abbey

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…

Benito Cereno

“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 Age of Authors

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…

The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman

The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman (1778) tells the story of a fictional midshipman abandoned in Queen Charlotte Sound, New Zealand, after a battle with Maori that claims the lives of ten of his shipmates. Inspired by an actual event on Captain Cook’s second voyage, Bowman’s adventures take him to increasingly sophisticated cultures—hunter/ gatherer, pastoral/nomadic, agricultural,…

The Basset Table

The Basset Table follows the fortunes of Lady Reveller, who runs a table where her friends play the card game basset, and her struggle to avoid marrying Lord Worthy. Meanwhile, Lady Reveller’s cousin, Valeria, spends her time conducting scientific experiments and dissections, but her father intends to marry her off to the bluff sea-captain Hearty.…

The Turkish Embassy Letters

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…