Moll Flanders: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton Critical Editions)

This book is pure genius. Defoe is able to do some amazing things through this book. The psychology of Moll is explored as she explores the psychology of the reader. It is entertaining and insightful. It is a slow read, but push through it.This edition of the book is fabulous. The last half of the book gives tons of context information! I highly recommend.I'm an English Lit major in college. This is a must read.

Condition is very good. After watching the movie, I am looking forward to reading this classic!

The extra features are a bit confusing.

Quick delivery fine condition

More readable than I expected, this book tells the life story of one Moll Flanders, how she mended her disreputable ways and became respectable. When I say "more readable", that is not to say that this is a book you can read without the glossary - referencing that definitely helped make the story more legible. But it is readable in the sense that there is drama and gossip and plot, from flings with scoundrels to illegitimate children with gentlemen, from above-board attempts to have enough to live on to thievery. Moll lives many lives with many people over the course of these pages.There is an impression given by the blurbs about this book that she finds the righteous path and mends her ways, that this is a sort of Pilgrim's Progress about one woman's soul. That definitely underplays the complexity of her path though, she tries to make an honest living repeatedly, and is foiled in many different ways. She also travels far and wide - this is not a woman who stayed in London her whole life. She travels around England and even to America, repeatedly. There is also much more of the secular about her final success than you might expect. Not only does she end up with a good man, but she ends up comfortably wealthy and able to support herself and those around her on the basis of her shrewd business decisions. It is not so much that she finds the one true gospel and her path is straight and clear from then on, but rather that she is finally able to make it work in a system that has been rigged against her from the start.

Another personal favorite of mine. Moll flanders was an adventurous character and i enjoyed reading this book over and over.

This human portrait of a woman is also an excellent sketch of the living conditions and the social stratification in England in the 18th century: 'the Age is so wicked and the Sex so Debauch'd'.It shows the immense chasm between a small class of wealthy people and the rest (Swift: a thousand to one). The latter were struggling for sheer survival and praying 'Give me not Poverty, lest I steal' ... to be hanged: 'If I swing by the String, I shall hear the Bell ring, and then there's an End of poor Jenny.'But both classes intermingled.As E.J. Burford quotes in his masterful book 'The Synfulle Citie':Those who were riche were hangid by the PursseThose who were poore were hangid by the NeckeDefoe's Moll Flanders: 'the passive Jade thinks of no Pleasure but the Money; and when he is as it were drunk in the Extasies of his wicked Pleasure, her Hands are in his Pockets.'Defoe paints the poor's religion as fatalism. Moll Flanders is all the time reproaching herself her Course of life, 'a horrid Complication of Wickedness, Whoredom, Adultery, Incest, Lying, Theft', but in the face of death at the gallows, 'I had now neither Remorse or Repentance ... no Thought of Heaven or Hell ... I neither had a Heart to ask God's Mercy.'Defoe's work is eminently modern, with his psychological insight 'What a Felicity is it to Mankind that they cannot see into the Hearts of one another', and 'Modest men are better Hypocrites';or, the ravages of alcoholism: 'the Drunk are the Men whom Solomon says, they go like an Ox to the Slaughter, till a Dart strikes through their Liver';and his feminism: 'the Disadvantage of the Women is a terrible Scandal upon Men', and 'Money only made a Woman agreeable.'Defoe's appeal to the reader - 'every Branch of my Story may be useful to honest People' - seems to be a smokescreen to circumvent censorship, because ultimately Moll Flanders prospers. This book is a perfect illustration of BernardMandeville's 'Triumph of Private Vices' in his 'Fable of the Bees'.Although some developments in this story are rather improbable, this superbly ironic and lively text constitutes an immortal portrait of the 'horrid Complication' to be a woman, here personified in Moll Flanders.Not to be missed.

Considered to be - by contemporary scholars - the first NOVEL written in the English language, it is also, technically, the only picaresque novel in English, with a female (anti-) heroine as "role" model. The perfect woman; born in jail, seduced and abandoned by wealthy cutsy boy, 18th century (though narrative taking place in 17th century) pretty poor girl has options aplenty; master whore and thief supreme she is - but always a romantic: ladies beware. Norton Edition a briliant one, with text folowed by over a hundred pages of criticism, from the date the book was published (DeFoe's name did not appear on cover at the time)to 21st century reviews: the best & the worst, not for me to judge.

. . . with Norton, a first class edition of a superb book

Spedizione veloce.

Not as expected

This was purchased for my daughter who is studying it at university

Perfetto