A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations or Memorials of the Most Remarkable Occurrences, as Well Publick as Private, Which Happened in Lond (Oxford World's Classics)

by Daniel Defoe (Author), David Roberts (Contributor), Louis Landa (Contributor)

• Used

  Paperback
  1999

  $3.28

  The shocking immediacy of Daniel Defoe's description of a plague-racked city makes it one of the most convincing accounts of the Great Plague of 1665 ever written.

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $3.28

  In 1665 the plague swept through London, claiming over 97,000 lives. Daniel Defoe was just five at the time of the plague, but he later called on his own memories, as well as his writing experience, to create this vivid chronicle of the epidemic and its victims. 'A Journal' (1722) follows Defoe's fictional narrator as he traces the devastating progress of the plague through the streets of London. Here we see a city transformed: some of its streets suspiciously empty, some - with crosses on their doors - overwhelmingly full of the sounds and smells of human suffering. And every living citizen he meets has a horrifying story that demands to be heard.

• Used

  Hardcover
  

  $3.28

• New

  Paperback
  1992

  $17.80

  The authoritative text has been fully annotated and makes available a perennially popular novel, one that has often been mistaken for an actual eyewitness account of the last great plague in England.
  
  Backgrounds encourages comparison of 1665 documents with those of the early 1720s, when England feared a new outbreak of the plague.
  
  Included are official government orders and newspaper accounts as well as writings by Defoe, John Graunt, the College of Physicians, and others.
  
  Contexts includes eight comparative pieces united by the theme of a community in crisis.
  
  From Thucydides to Boccaccio to modern accounts by Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, and Susan Sontag, this collection represents some of the most celebrated observers and critics in western civilization who have seen what plagues reveal about human nature.
  
  Criticism reprints seven of the best essays on the novel, including interpretations by Sir Walter Scott, Maximillian E. Novak, John J. Richetti, and John Bender, among others.
  
  A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.