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

Seager

Abstract

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.

Citation

Seager. (2017). Literary Evaluation and Authorship Attribution, or Defoe's Politics at the Hanoverian Succession. Huntington Library Quarterly, 47-69. https://doi.org/10.1353/hlq.2017.0002

• Acceptance Date: Jun 1, 2014
• Publication Date: Mar 1, 2017
• Journal: Huntington Library Quarterly
• Print ISSN: 0018-7895
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Pages: 47-69
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/hlq.2017.0002
• Keywords: Daniel Defoe, attribution studies
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hlq.2017.0002