Journal of the Plague Year
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010
Language: eng
Number of pages: 320
ISBN-13: 9780199572830
Subjects: England, fiction; London (england), fiction; British and irish fiction (fictional works by one author); Fiction, historical
Description: Defoe's account of the bubonic plague that swept London in 1665 remains as vivid as it is harrowing. Based on Defoe's own childhood memories and prodigious research, A Journal of the Plague Year walks the line between fiction, history, and reportage. In meticulous and unsentimental detail it renders the daily life of a city under siege; the often gruesome medical precautions and practices of the time; the mass panics of a frightened citizenry; and the solitary travails of Defoe's narrator, a man who decides to remain in the city through it all, chronicling the course of events with an unwavering eye. Defoe's Journal remains perhaps the greatest account of a natural disaster ever written. A novel recounting the individual tragedies of the great plague of 1665.