Moll Flanders : an authoritative text : backgrounds and sources, criticism

Whether or not the main source for Moll herself was a female criminal Defoe may have known personally in Newgate Prison, such as Moll King, his heroine's adventures echo events in the popular criminal biographies of the day. It is clear, moreover, that Defoe drew upon his own earlier periodical writings for a number of the episodes in the novel. The Backgrounds and Sources section provides material that influenced the conception of Moll Flanders. The Criticism section offers one of the most comprehensive selections of opinion on the novel yet available in a single volume. In addition to a general survey of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century appraisals of Defoe and the novel, the selections include commentary on problems that have concerned modern critics of the novel, such as ironic intent, the structure of the novel, thematic and philosophical insights, and character evaluations. Among the critics represented are Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, James Joyce, G.A. Starr, Alan McKillop, Ian Watt, Terence Martin, Wayne C. Booth, Martin Price, Arnold Kettle, Maximillian Novak, Robert Alan Donovan and Michael Shinage