Daniel Defoe, "Moll Flanders"

Moll Flanders is a highly controversial book. Shocking some because of this titillating subject, its crude form and dubious morality, it is acclaimed by others for its brilliant eighteenth-century refraction of Spanish picaresque rules. The dialectic tension it maintains between genres as different as scandalous memiors or spiritual autobiographies, criminal biographies or conduct-books, undoubtedly accounts for its enduring success. This study, especially devised for CAPES and Agrégation students, supplies them with a systematic analysis of all the narrative components of the work. The apparently disjointed plot, the characters' quest of identity and its symbolic relation with space and time, the oblique, yet wide-ranging, satire of society, Moll's ambiguous repentance and relation with irony ( ?) are successively tackled. Narrative and stylistic answers evidence that, far from 'realism' and artlessness, what Defoe was after in Moll Flanders was less the narration of a story than the story of a narration, in a world a novel. Cet ouvrage est le fruit de la collaboration entre Didier-Erudition, éditeur réputé internationalement dans le domaine des études anglaises, et le Centre National d'Enseignement à Distance, établissement public d'enseignement qui dispense des formations de tous niveaux à 350 000 inscrits répartis dans le monde entier. Cette contribution scientifique d'enseignants chercheurs de l'Université française s'intègre dans les préparations assurées par le CNED aux CAPES et aux agrégations d'anglais qui comprennent aussi des directions de travail, des cours, des devoirs avec corrections personnalisée et tutorat.