About this title: In this novel, set in 1665, when the plague was rampant in Europe, a group of Londoners leaves the city and takes refuge in Epsom Forest. Daniel Defoe used the novel as an opportunity to express his disagreement with the unpopular proposed policy of quarantining London. It is notable for its intensely realistic scenes of terror, suffering, and death based on Defoe's childhood memories of London during the plague years.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Signet Classics
Date Published: 1960
ISBN-13:9780451509277ISBN:0451509277
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. First Printing. Great copy. Binding is tight, text is unmarked, previous owner s seal inside front, pages have tanning due to age. Cover shows some soil and fading, mild edgewear and creasing/tilt to the spine. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Dover Publications
Date Published: 2001
ISBN-13:9780486419190ISBN:0486419193
Description: New. No dust jacket. Right off the shelf, just a few left, satisfaction guaranteed. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 192 p. Dover Thrift Editions. Audience: General/trade. read more
Edition: Paperback Edition
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: The New American Library, Inc., NY
Date Published: 1960
Description: Good. This novel covers the Plague in London. Defoe "presented to write a narrative of the plague which should be not only a true account of the events of the year [1665], but should appeal to the mind of the reader as the experiences of an eye-witness. " Pages are age-toned; rear cover is torn at the bottom corner; slight nibbling on foreedges (nickle-sized mark). read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Oxford Univ Pr, Cary, North Carolina, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1990
ISBN-13:9780192826824ISBN:0192826824
Description: Good. 5 x 7. In good, clean, unmarked conditon. Spine lightly creased. Cover shows edge/shelfwear. Text lightly tanning. Defoe's reconstruction of the Great Plague of 1665 narrated by an imaginary citizen in London. read more
Edition: Reprint
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, E Rutherford, New Jersey, U.S.A.
Date Published: 2003
ISBN-13:9780140437850ISBN:0140437851
Description: Good. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. A basically good paperback copy that looks a little rough. The spine has a couple of reading creases in it. The cover has two bent corners, some rubbing of the edges and a hole poked through the back cover. On the good side, the text is clean and unmarked. ------------------------------------------------Originally published in 1722, this piece of historical reconstruction imaginatively recreates the year 1665 in which the plague sweep through London killing 100, 000 ... read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Penquin Books 1966
Date Published: 1966
Description: This paperback is a nice tight clean binding. Some cover wear, chip on spine. 256 pages. Pages yellowing. Some sticker damage on back cover. read more
"My first experience with Defoe, and for a class that's sort of out of my comfort zone (I rarely read anything older than 19th century, what can I say?). Admittedly, it was an interesting book to discuss in class, specifically in terms of the course's aims--talking about bodies, the cultural production of them, and how they are managed (particularly diseased ones, as in this text) by the state and other systems of power. However, reading the book itself was a real chore. The first 40-50 pages are quick-paced and fascinating, purportedly told as a non-fictional narrative by a 'survivor' of the London plague, and concerned with the onset of the plague and how people first reacted to it--then Defoe continues to talk about the ways in which people escaped the city, how the plague spread, and what officials did to maintain order. This was all good. Unfortunately, after the first third of the book, the rest of it seemed to be merely a re-telling of the first part. The same scenarios with different nameless people; mortality rates for this week and then that week; cries of woe and terror; families reacting in the exact way other families Defoe had already described had. Moreover, I had a lot of trouble connecting to anything in the book, because neither the narrator (the nameless, until the last page, H.F.) nor any of the people he described were well-drawn, or had any sort of interior in which to locate yourself. Not that reader-identification necessitates good storytelling, but I found myself completely detached as Defoe detailed, for about the 1000th time, the faceless, nameless mother hanging out of her window crying DEATH DEATH! Or the millionth time that we heard about how 'you could never tell who was infected!' By this point, I just wanted everyone to die so that the novel would be over. Moreover, though Defoe is thought to be one of the first writers with an eye toward the plight of the poor, I felt his attention to the poor of London to be fairly flawed, and on several occasions, he pulled a sort of Swiftian mandate out--at one point he says that he's glad the plague killed so many poor people off, because the city could no longer afford to have them around. It seemed that he was concerned with them, but only to a point--and at that point, they were simply a mass of vermin that don't deserve justice or respect. So I had an issue with hearing people in class go on and on about how great he was for being 'tolerant' of these masses.
In any case, worthwhile if you want to slog through it for the politics--perhaps not so much so if you're looking for an exciting read."
"This book was written in the early 1700s to give a fictionalized chronicle of the way in which a plague outbreak in the mid-1600s affected the people in London. It is timeless because it addresses the ways in which human behave when confronting a little-understood, highly contagious, and often fatal disease."
"Surely Geraldine Brooks read Defoe in the process of researching Year of Wonders. Defoe fights the urge to analyze the plague in terms of his religious beliefs and is left finally with only the powerful sense that he survived. Indeed, and we are grateful for that!"
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