Defoe at 350

Single-author literary criticism titles on Daniel Defoe averaged a little less than one per year between the early 1960s and the mid 1980s (I count over twenty between 1962 and 1987), but the rate has since then rapidly declined. It would be mistaken to argue anything like Defoe’s critical neglect: it is simply that, with the welcome efforts of canon expansion and the turn to a more fully contextualized analysis of literature, Defoe has taken his place alongside a number of other authors. He normally commands at least a chapter in studies that pair a contextual theme (“Law,” “Family,” “Politics,” “Education,” and so on) with periodized genre (“Eighteenth-Century Novel”). However, it might be that single-author studies are again viable, though with none of the ahistorical “Great Man” connotations they may have previously entailed. Resigned as we are to the problems of constructing the bounds of our enquiry by theme, period, or genre, the oeuvre of a single writer makes equally good sense as a principle of delimitation. Accordingly, each of the six books reviewed here represents a welcome addition to Defoe studies, either by supplying new readings of important works, by casting light on marginalized texts, by challenging conventional wisdom about Defoe, or by setting his achievement in larger intellectual and material contexts. Some of the best work does all of these things.

First up, Defoe (2008) has joined the ranks of Cambridge Companion subjects, following Behn (2004) and Burney (2007), and preceding Bunyan (2010) and Richardson (no news). This publication order would have seemed very strange forty years ago. John Richetti has gathered twelve essays whose utility for the nonspecialist is immediately apparent, but whose ability to educate the reader more familiar with Defoe means that it merits reading by all. The challenge here was always going to be reflecting the full range of Defoe’s writings while serving the student reader who will usually concentrate on the novels. Though one might gripe about a few particular areas of Defoe’s output and mindset that are underrepresented—his writings on the supernatural, his conduct manuals, and his religious faith, for example—this collection serves its purpose very well. In terms of Defoe’s novels, Hal Gladfelder writes on crime fiction, Deirdre Lynch on money and character in the novels, Richetti on Defoe’s narrative innovation, Ellen Pollak on Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724), and Michael Seidel on Robinson Crusoe (1719). Because the novels are well represented elsewhere in this review essay, I will focus on chapters that illuminate the nonfiction.

Paula Backscheider flips the customary biographical opener on its head by seeking “the man in the works” (5), tentatively teasing out personality traits from Defoe’s corpus rather than trotting through biographical “facts.” The casual reader can get factual information from Backscheider’s ODNB entry and the aspiring specialist can go on to Backscheider’s and Maximillian Novak’s biographies. What emerges here is a picture of Defoe as a man constantly looking to prove himself, to gain “credit” in several senses. His strong sense of civic responsibility, which magnetized him to a pragmatic political moderation, is set alongside Defoe’s self-identification with the prophet Jeremiah in the exculpatory Appeal to Honour and Justice (1715), suffering and embattled in the service of preaching truth and warning...