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Novel streets: the rebuilding of London and Defoe's 'A Journal of the Plague Year.' (English novelist Daniel Defoe)(Making Genre: Studies in the Novel or Something Like It, 1684-1762)

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From: Studies in the Novel
Date: 19980622
Author:Wall, Cynthia

Daniel Defoe's 'A Journal of the Plague Year,' like others of his urban novels, uses fictional narrative to redefine and reoccupy the new strange city imaginatively. London had its Great Fire of 1666 in the year after the one in which Defoe set his novel published in 1722, but the novel is in a way in memory of the changed scene of the city. The novel is topographical and the narrator ties each turn to a named place in a sort of generic response to the unknown. At the end the streets are reoccupied and are a point of communication once again. The new streets became known in much post-Fire ...

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