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| Moll Flanders (Norton Critical Editions) | 
 enlarge | Author: Daniel Defoe
Creator: Albert J. Rivero
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Category: Book
List Price: $11.95
Buy New: $6.00
You Save: $5.95 (50%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 129175
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 544
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 0393978621
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.5
EAN: 9780393978629
ASIN: 0393978621
Publication Date: January 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Moll Flanders is one of the best-selling novels of all time. This Norton Critical Edition is again based on the first edition text (1722), the only text known to be Defoe's own. It is accompanied by detailed explanatory annotations and the editor's essay outlining the novel's textual history. "Contexts" collects related documents on criminal transport, contemporary accounts of lives of crime, and colonial laws as they applied to servants, slaves, and runaways. "Criticism" includes eleven interpretations by Juliet McMaster, Everett Zimmerman, Maximillian E. Novak, Henry Knight Miller, Ian A. Bell, Carol Kay, Paula B. Backscheider, John Rietz, Ann Louise Kibbie, John Richetti, and Ellen Pollak. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included. About the series: No other series of classic texts equals the caliber of the Norton Critical Editions. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with the comprehensive pedagogical apparatus necessary to appreciate the work fully. Careful editing, first-rate translation, and thorough explanatory annotations allow each text to meet the highest literary standards while remaining accessible to students. Each edition is printed on acid-free paper and every text in the series remains in print. Norton Critical Editions are the choice for excellence in scholarship for students at more than 2,000 universities worldwide.
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| Customer Reviews:
 strange ways January 7, 2008
0 out of 10 found this review helpful
If the underworld and the criminal mind interests you then read it. Strangeways is a hard time prison in England. Moll reads like something from there. It reminded me a bit of Genet's autoboigraphy as a homosexual and pick pocket. Yick. Moll is obviously a cover for Defoe's tentative homosexuality. Its not well suppressed like in Robinson Crusoe with his wonder Man Friday. It gets to be obvious and in the way like a sore thumb especially when you read these books together. Yuck. But there are those remarkable insights.
 Give me not Poverty, lest I steal September 3, 2005
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
This human portrait of a woman is also an excellent sketch of the living conditions and the social stratification in England in the 18th century: 'the Age is so wicked and the Sex so Debauch'd'.
It shows the immense chasm between a small class of wealthy people and the rest (Swift: a thousand to one). The latter were struggling for sheer survival and praying 'Give me not Poverty, lest I steal' ... to be hanged: 'If I swing by the String, I shall hear the Bell ring, and then there's an End of poor Jenny.'
But both classes intermingled.
As E.J. Burford quotes in his masterful book 'The Synfulle Citie':
Those who were riche were hangid by the Pursse
Those who were poore were hangid by the Necke
Defoe's Moll Flanders: 'the passive Jade thinks of no Pleasure but the Money; and when he is as it were drunk in the Extasies of his wicked Pleasure, her Hands are in his Pockets.'
Defoe paints the poor's religion as fatalism. Moll Flanders is all the time reproaching herself her Course of life, 'a horrid Complication of Wickedness, Whoredom, Adultery, Incest, Lying, Theft', but in the face of death at the gallows, 'I had now neither Remorse or Repentance ... no Thought of Heaven or Hell ... I neither had a Heart to ask God's Mercy.'
Defoe's work is eminently modern, with his psychological insight 'What a Felicity is it to Mankind that they cannot see into the Hearts of one another', and 'Modest men are better Hypocrites';
or, the ravages of alcoholism: 'the Drunk are the Men whom Solomon says, they go like an Ox to the Slaughter, till a Dart strikes through their Liver';
and his feminism: 'the Disadvantage of the Women is a terrible Scandal upon Men', and 'Money only made a Woman agreeable.'
Defoe's appeal to the reader - 'every Branch of my Story may be useful to honest People' - seems to be a smokescreen to circumvent censorship, because ultimately Moll Flanders prospers. This book is a perfect illustration of Bernard
Mandeville's 'Triumph of Private Vices' in his 'Fable of the Bees'.
Although some developments in this story are rather improbable, this superbly ironic and lively text constitutes an immortal portrait of the 'horrid Complication' to be a woman, here personified in Moll Flanders.
Not to be missed.
Dust off this musty book for some good social critique September 21, 2004
2 out of 9 found this review helpful
Moll Flanders is a typical 18th Century book that one would read in a class about early English novels. Daniel Defoe's so-called `masterpiece' gets labeled sometimes as one of the first novels ever written, and sometimes the prose shows. Written from the first-person perspective of the title character, Moll
Flanders tells the tale of a poor social low-life who has to turn to a life of crime after five failed marriages. Readers receive a rambling narrative of colorful characters that reside in the underbelly of 18th Century London. Moll Flanders was written originally as a sordid account that was to be taken as
`fact,' because of the way that Defoe mimicked the book after a popular form at the time that interviewed criminals on their deathbed. Defoe and his contemporaries used to compile these tales of redemption or non-repentance into what was called the Newgate Records. As the reader feels bad for Moll throughout the text, readers will see her go from a life of barely getting by to marrying her brother by accident to living a life of crime
through her own agency. A sophisticated critique of the prison system and class economics of England, Defoe's work stands the test of time for fresh commentary and readability. While most people might find Defoe's writing style to be a bit antiquated, the story is not, and will most likely reach its intended
audience. It's still true today that those criminals who become public examples are the ones from most of the lower castes, as are most criminals in general. The biggest question in Defoe's Moll Flanders still remains unanswered: How can one move up in a society that benefits those without any sort of inherited wealth or the means to further their position?
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