Looking back at Defoe through Davis

In reading Davis' discussion of the characteristics of ballads and other printed prose narratives, I was able to more clearly understand Defoe's stylistic choices in writing Journal of a Plague Year.

Through reading Davis' chapters about the origin of the novel, I was able to better understand Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year because it brought to light the historical facts that surrounded the new printed prose narratives and how this novel fit those guidelines. The guidelines themselves are very clearly defined by Davis and gave me an understanding of what the expectations were for a novel when Defoe was writing. Also, I was able to compare the guidelines set forth by Davis against my own notions of the novel and what I would believe to be the expectations our generation would have. Defoe's novel adheres to the popular characteristics of the ballads that Davis describes and since the ballads were so popular, Defoe was able to just expand from a short ballad to an extended story with the same characteristics.
Davis discusses that people were drawn to the journalistic style of the ballads because they gave a sense of recentness to the story which may not have happened recently, or perhaps at all. Defoe's journalistic style keeps us as modern readers however from "getting into" the novel the way we would with a Stephen King or Dean Koontz bestseller.
This also leads one to notice the attention to criminal behavior that Defoe pays, just as Davis describes the ballads as being dominantly about criminal activity. This theme of people being obsessed with deviant, criminal behavior is clearly more timeless than Defoe's journalistic style. While we no longer desire for our novels to give accounts in journalistic fashion, we do tend to be drawn towards the more criminal, risque, and deviant types of novels just as Davis described in his chapters. This voyeuristic quality has proven timeless and continues to bolster istelf in our current media.