- Enseignant-e: Elizabeth Kukorelly Leverington
Although mainly known today as the author of the novel Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe was probably the most prolific writer of the eighteenth century. Publishing in many different genres, from religious tracts to criminal biographies, from news periodicals to conduct books, from travel guides to apparition narratives, the variety and quantity of his productions are remarkable. During this seminar we will read two of his novels, each of which recounts the life of a marginal, picaresque, at times criminal, individual. We will confront these texts to other writings by Defoe and others, mainly in the criminal biography genre, focusing on the links between the 'fictional' and 'non-fictional' types of prose, in view of the emergence of the novel genre during the early decades of the eighteenth century.