Captain Singleton - Defoe, Daniel

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Résumé :
Daniel Defoe's Captain Singleton is a vigorous early English novel of piracy, survival, crime, travel, and moral reckoning. Kidnapped as a child, abandoned into a brutal world, and driven through danger by necessity and appetite, Bob Singleton becomes an adventurer, wanderer, and pirate whose life crosses seas, continents, criminal enterprises, and uneasy spiritual reflection. Defoe gives the story the force of a supposed confession, combining maritime adventure, colonial travel, outlaw life, and the practical detail that made his fiction feel startlingly immediate to eighteenth-century readers. First published in 1720 as The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton, the novel belongs to the great early period of Defoe's fiction, close in date and spirit to Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year, and Roxana. Its account of piracy and wandering places it naturally among classic sea stories and early adventure fiction, while its interest in conscience, commerce, survival, and repentance reflects Defoe's larger concern with the moral pressures of modern life. Readers of classic fiction, pirate novels, sea adventure, eighteenth-century literature, early English novels, and historical adventure will find in Captain Singleton one of Defoe's most energetic and revealing works....

Biographie:
Daniel Defoe was an English writer, journalist, pamphleteer, businessman, and novelist whose work helped shape the development of the English novel. Born in London around 1660, Defoe lived through political upheaval, religious controversy, commercial expansion, imprisonment, bankruptcy, and public punishment, experiences that gave his writing its unusual mixture of practical detail, moral pressure, and worldly knowledge. Before becoming famous as a novelist, he wrote widely on politics, trade, religion, economics, and public affairs.Defoe is best known for Robinson Crusoe, one of the most influential adventure novels in English literature, but his fiction also includes Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year, Roxana, Colonel Jack, and Captain Singleton. His novels often present themselves as memoirs or confessions, drawing readers into lives shaped by danger, commerce, crime, survival, repentance, and social mobility. In Captain Singleton, Defoe turns to piracy, travel, and sea adventure while preserving the moral and psychological complexity that marks his best fiction. He died in 1731, leaving a body of work central to classic English literature, early realism, adventure fiction, and the history of the novel....