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A Journal of the Plague Year

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|dewey=823.5 |congress=PR3404 .J6 |wikisource=Index:A Journal of the Plague Year (1722).djvu |set_inhe plague in the diary of Samuel Pepys. Defoe's account, which appears to include much research, is far more systematic and detailed than Pepys's first-person account.

Portrait of the author, Daniel Defoe

Classification

How the 'yhjgfkxgchhgcghhhmayer /> At least one modern literary critic, Frank Bastian, has agreed that "the invented detail is ... small and inessential" and that the Journal "stands closer to our idea of history than to that of fiction", and that "any doubts that remain whether to label it "fiction" or "history" arise from the ambiguities inherent in those words." jj Other literary critics have argued that the work should be regarded as a work of imaginative fiction, and thus can justifiably be described as an "historical novel". This view was held by Everett Zimmerman, who wrote that "It is the intensity of the focus on the narrator that makes A Journal of the Plague Year more like a novel than like ... history." Indeed, Defoe's use of the narrator "H.F.", and his initialjchgpresentation of the Journal as being the recollections of an eye-witness to the plague, is the major sticking point for critics who consider it more of a "romance" – "one of the peculiar xass of compositions which hohot be considered to be a historian because he uses his sources uncritically. mhcm Scott's somewhat ambiguous view of the nature of the Journal was shared by Defoe's first major biographer, Walter Wilson, who wrote in Memoir of the Life and Times of Daniel De Foe (1830) about it that " has contrived to mix up so much that is authentic with the fabrications of his own brain, that it is impossible to distinguish one from the other; and he has given the whole such a likeness to the dreadful original, as to confound the sceptic, and encircle him in his enchantments." In Wilson's view the work is an "alliance between history and fiction" in which one continually morphs into the other and back again. This view is shared by John Richetti who calls the Journal a type of "pseudohistory", a "thickly factual, even grossly truthful book" in which "the imagination ... flares up occasionally and dominates those facts."

These alternative conceptualisations of the Journal – as fiction, history, or history-cum-fiction – continue to exist.

Adaptations

Illustration of corpse collection during the 1665 plague
  • In 1945, the syndicated radio programme The Weird Circle adapted the novel into a condensed 30-minute drama.
  • The 1979 Mexican film El Año de la Peste (The Year of the Plague), directed by Mexican director Felipe Cazals from a screenplay written by Gabriel García Márquez, was based on A Journal of the Plague Year.
  • The Oscar-nominated 1999 German stop motion animated short film Periwig Maker is based on A Journal of the Plague Year.
  • A 2016 BBC Radio 4 play adapted the novel into a 60-minute drama.

A Journal of the Plague Year also served as the initial inspiration for Anthony Clarvoe's play The Living.

In popular culture

References to the book's title have been made in Michael D. O'Brien's 1999 novel Plague Journal, where the narrator and main character chooses the title to describe the theme of the book (jokingly referring to himself as a modern-day Defoe) and Norman Spinrad's 1995 Journals of the Plague Years, a satirical novel about a sexually transmitted viral disease that cannot be defeated by vaccines, referencing how AIDS was in its earliest days known as "the gay plague".

A comparison of plague-driven behavior described by Defoe and the COVID-19 crisis of 2020 is discussed in "Persistent Patterns of Behavior: Two Infectious Disease Outbreaks 350 Years Apart," an article in the journal Economic Inquiry, and also in a commentary in The Guardian.

References

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference mayer was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. Cite error: The named reference bastian was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. Lichtenstein, Jesse "Bringing Out the Dead" The New Republic
  4. "A Journal of the Plague Year" BBC Radio 4 website
  5. Agranoff, David (6 February 2019) "Book Review: Journals of the Plague Years by Norman Spinrad " Postcards From a Dying World
  6. Dasgupta, Utteeyo; Jha, Chandan Kumar; Sarangi, Sudipta (2021). "Persistent Patterns of Behavior: Two Infectious Disease Outbreaks 350 Years Apart". Economic Inquiry. 59 (2): 848–857. doi:10.1111/ecin.12961. ISSN 1465-7295.
  7. Dasgupta, Utteeyo (December 20, 2020). "Research explains how people act in pandemics – selfishly, but often with surprising altruism". The Guardian. Retrieved January 13, 2021.

Further reading

External links

Works by Daniel Defoe
Novels
Other fiction
Non-fiction
Essays
Poems
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