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from Part II - Literary Context
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 April 2023
Although best known today as an influential early novelist and a controversial satirist, Daniel Defoe was recognized by his contemporaries, first and foremost, as a prolific journalist. Defoe seems to have principally written, edited, or contributed to perhaps two dozen periodicals during his varied career, and his journalistic output between about 1690 and 1730 amounts to many millions of words on a wide range of topics, including, reflexively, ’News-Writers’. Defoe played a formative role in the development of the periodical press in the early eighteenth century, not least because his body of work makes a sustained argument for what journalism could be and do in modern Britain. Defoe’s journalism is about journalism – about irresponsible newsmongers, credulous news readers, and the tension between ’Matters of Fact’ and what he repeatedly derides in the Review as ’false News’. This chapter surveys the broad range of Defoe’s meta-journalism in order to account for both his theory of conscientious journalism and the public perception of ’Mr. Review’ as ’Correct-General of all the News-Papers, excepting his own’.
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