Histoire des pirates et pirate(s) de l’Histoire dans quelques écrits de Daniel Defoe

• Main Author: Emmanuelle Peraldo
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Institut du Monde Anglophone 2011-09-01
• Series: Etudes Epistémè
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/439

The history Defoe wrote about in his various texts was at the same time History with a capital H, for he was interested in historical events and real facts, and history with a small h, that of everyday life and common people. Piracy is situated at the crossroads of these two acceptions of history/History, as it means narrating the lives of criminals, of outcasts excluded from society because of their status. But at the same time, the pirates that Defoe’s reader discovers in his books are in a way the Princes of pirates, with such famous pirates as Avery or Kidd, which leads us to read these stories as another version of History. Piracy is presented as an alternative history and can thus be considered as a particular reading of History. This article analyses the modalities of representation of piracy in Defoe’s work, in the way Defoe, a hack writer apparently fascinated by pirates, used and parodied the historical genre to write a story of pariahs, of those who were excluded from society, and hence from History.