It was the most Serge Gainsbourg's preferred book.
Daniel defoe is not a only-one-book man (Robinson Crusoe).
It is an aesthete book which one exchanges the name between friends.
What is extraordinary, it is the realism of story. All descriptions are extraordinary. They agree elsewhere with what wa...more

Historical fiction about the plague of London in 1665. Defoe was just a 5 year old child when it happened but documented about it in exhaustive details so it will sound like a real life journal. It is first person narrative but it does not focus on the person of H.F, a saddler that stayed to prot...more

I have seen this taught as a non-fiction account of the Great Plague of 1666; it isn't.

What it actually is: a very early historical novel. (Defoe was alive, but was a small child, in 1666.) There's no reason why it shouldn't be taught in a history class (as it has the virtue of being short, amon...more

"A journal of the plague year" is actually a fictional account covering this time in history, and although Defoe was alive, we are given a narrator instead, and this was written near enough sixty years afterwards. We are certainly not told much about this narrator, apart from the fact he has fami...more

1665 yılında Londra’da yaşanmış olan veba salgınını tüm gerçekçiliğiyle okuyucuya sunan "Veba Yılı Günlüğü / A Journal of the Plague Year", Daniel Defoe’nun bulduğu günlükleri bir araya getirerek ortaya çıkardığı edebi açıdan olabildiğince akıcı ve etkileyici bir eser. Hastalığı kapan insanların...more

I taught this a couple times (Soph Eng Lit survey), instead of Moll or Robinson (or, indeed, Pamela or pt of Tristram). Of course it's a historical reconstruction: Defoe was 5 in the Plague Year, a year before the Great Fire, and two before the Dutch sailed to Chatham, on the Bay of Thames, and c...more

Because writing is an expression of human character, what is true of one's character is true of one's writing as well. A person's strengths and weaknesses are often two sides of the same coin—the sympathetic character is often permissive, the assertive unreasonable, the ardent rash—and the same t...more

In the crowded , unhealthy, unclean, foul, pest dominated, filthy city of London, the Bubonic Plague breaks out, in 1665, no surprise, it has occurred before, in fact just a few years, previously, but this escalates, felling some say, 100,000 people, who never rise again. Daniel Defoe, the invent...more

One of the problems with reviewing the earliest authors of fiction is that they were writing at a time before the rules had been properly worked out. Novels took on the form we know and love because of these writer’s successes and because of their failures. It was up to them to forge the template...more