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Objects, Imaginings, and Facts: Going beyond Genre in Behn and Defoe G. Gabrielle Starr NeitherAphra Behn nor Daniel Defoe was overly concerned with maintaining the boundaries of genre; however, neither Behn nor Defoe was primarily concerned with pushing those boundaries, either. Their work offers challenges to concepts ofthe novel that put mimetic realism at the heart of the genre as well as to versions of literary history that employ simple abstractions—whether ofgenre or ofform—beyond their power to explain or describe.1 Howevermuch scholars are drawn to solve the generic problems offered byworks such as Oroonoko orJournal ofthe Plague Year—truth or lie, fact or fiction, romance or history—the literarylandscape in die period does notyield 1 As Michael McKeon suggests, "'The novel' must be understood as what Marx calls a 'simple abstraction,' adeceptively monolithic category thatencloses acomplex historical process." The Origins oftheEnglish Novel (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 20. Writing always takes place on the borders ofgenre: as Derrida maintains, the law ofgenre is always subject to "aprinciple ofcontamination, a lawofimpurity." Derrida, The LawofGenre," Acts ofLiterature, ed. DerekAttridge (NewYork: Routledge, 1992), p. 227. This is particularly true ofearly novel ficdon.J. Paul Hunter argues that "no single word or phrase distinguishes the novel from romance or from anything else, and to setde for 'realism' or 'individualism' or 'character' as the defining characteristic ... trivializes the conception ofa literary species." Hunter, Before Noveb: The Cultural Contexts ofEighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), pp. 22-23. Such "trivialization" occurswhen critics seek to unifyabody oftexts without examiningthe stakes ofunification. Iwould like to thank the anonymous£CFreaders fortheir helpfulness and rigour; I am also indebted toTerri Hume Oliver,AmyMae King, and John C. Harpole for dieir generously given criticism. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 16, Number 4,JuIy 2004 500 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION readily to such desires, in part because genre is often secondary to a range of supervening considerations: pressures of moral regulation; debates aboutgender, class, and political ideology; nationalism; or the cultivation ofaffective relationships between readerand text—desires for novelty, beauty, even sexual titillation. Indeed, the complexities surrounding the literature ofthe Restoration and eighteenüi century bring genre theory and the borders ofgenres into question.2 This article offers an alternative mode for negotiating the problems of Behn's and Defoe's "factual fictions" by questioning the ways Oroonoko (1688), "The Unfortunate Bride" (1698),JournalofthePlague Year (1722), and Roxana (1724) manipulate and explore the limits of imaginative activity.3 Throughout diis period, imagination is notjusta matter ofphantasm but ofperception; like the factual fictions ofBehn and Defoe, imagination concerns both whatwe believe to be truth and what we are certain is not From Thomas Hobbes toJoseph Addison, imagination is a prime mover of human mental life. In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes argues that imagination is central to memory and foresight, and even to the comprehension of language; mental discourse itselfis created byasequence ofimaginings.4 The Hobbesian imagination is the foundation from which the internal may take its forms and through which the passions enter the mind; for Addison imagination is a faculty attuned to die world of empirical details and 2 The term "genre" comes into use in the nineteenth century (OED). From Dennis to Addison,Johnson, Blair, and others, discussions of literary "kind" took second place to discussions of "beauties" and defects. Many twentieth-century readers have investigated Behn's relation to genre, includingJoanna Lipking, "Confusing Matters: Searching the Backgrounds of Oroonoko," Aphra Behn Studies, ed. Janet Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 259-81, and Robert L. Chibka, "'Oh! Do Not Fear a Woman's Invention': Truth, Falsehood, and Fiction in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," Texas Studies in Literature andLanguage30:4 (Winter 1988), 510-32. About Defoe and historiography, see Robert Mayer, "The Reception o{Ajournai ofthePlague Yearand the Nexus ofFiction and History in the Novel," ELH 57 (1990), 529-56, and Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation (Lexington: University ofKentucky Press, 1986), among others. 3 The best critical history ofthe imagination in the long eighteenüi century isJames Engell, The CreativeImagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). In Pope's Imagination (Manchester Manchester University Press, 1984), David Fairer gives a nuanced discussion of the broad scope...

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