Literary Evaluation and Authorship Attribution, or Defoe's Politics at the Hanoverian Succession

In this essay, Nicholas Seager argues for re-attributing two pamphlets to Daniel Defoe: A Secret History of One Year (1714) and Memoirs of the Conduct of Her Late Majesty and Her Last Ministry(1715). These works, published shortly after the Hanoverian succession, were excluded from Defoe's cano...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Huntington Library quarterly Vol. 80; no. 1; pp. 47 - 69
Main Author Seager, Nicholas
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press 01.04.2017
Subjects
Authorship
Autobiographical literature
Autobiographies
British & Irish literature
Brochures
Defoe, Daniel (1660-1731)
English literature
Essays
Evidence
History
Poetry
Politics
Value Judgment
Writing
United Kingdom > UK
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Summary:In this essay, Nicholas Seager argues for re-attributing two pamphlets to Daniel Defoe: A Secret History of One Year (1714) and Memoirs of the Conduct of Her Late Majesty and Her Last Ministry(1715). These works, published shortly after the Hanoverian succession, were excluded from Defoe's canon by Furbank and Owens on the grounds that the writing was poor in quality. A closer review of the external and internal evidence, however, points to Defoe as the author of these occasional political tracts, which reveal his attempts to attenuate what he perceived as the harmful effects of government by a single-party ministry.
ISSN:0018-7895
1544-399X
DOI:10.1353/hlq.2017.0002