Daniel Essig

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid | UAM · Departamento de Filología Inglesa

Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year illustrates a paradox about the new public sphere, one of the vital elements in the historical transition between the Early Modern Weltanschauung and Modernity proper: that the domain of rational enquiry and analysis evolved under the impulse and pressure of pre-modern passions and anti-rationalism. This...

The article looks into the way in which Daniel Defoe, in creating H.F., the narrator of A Journal of the Plague Year, uses models of passionate curiosity as the motivation for writings of the self such as the spiritual autobiography. It is the play of fear and curiosity which drives H.F. to write what is supposed to be a diary but indeed is not one...

Cultural studies deal with the "sentimental revolution", the "reading revolution" in the 1700s. This chapter explores one theme - male sensibility making men more like women - in two novels: Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, as precursor to the revolution of sensibility, and Samuel Richardson's Pamela, the earliest bestseller of sentimen...

cultural and material change described by historians of reading intersects with literary history in different and complex ways. An example is the cultural practice of silent reading in intimacy, which came to be pivotal for the literature of sensibility. It was gendered female in the eighteenth century and looked upon with disfavour, notably by mor...

The article explores an alternative genealogy for Richardson’s novel of sensibility, and looks at the practice of reading in sentimental novels. Richardson cannot be properly understood if one does not take into account the political culture of his time, including misrepresentation and manipulation of the public. The centre of the article is a disc...