This book seeks to recover something of the original excitement, challenge, and significance of Defoe's four novels of criminal life by reading them within and against the conventions of early eighteenth-century criminal biography. Crime raised...
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This book seeks to recover something of the original excitement, challenge, and significance of Defoe's four novels of criminal life by reading them within and against the conventions of early eighteenth-century criminal biography. Crime raised deeply troubling questions in Defoe's time, not least because it seemed a powerful sign of the breakdown of traditional social authority and order. Arguing that Defoe's novels provided ways of facing working through, as well as avoiding, certain of the moral and intellectual difficulties that crime raised for him and his readers, Faller shows how the "literary," even "aesthetic" qualities of his fiction contributed to these ends. Analyzing the various ways in which Defoe's novels exploited, deformed, and departed from the genre they imitate, this book attempts to define the specific social and political (which is to say moral and ideological) value of a given set of "literary" texts against those of a more "ordinary" form of narrative Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and Roxana are given extended readings in individual chapters. Other topics considered at length include the vexed question of Defoe's realism, his own version of reader response theory and how he deploys it, the novels' structural imitation of providential design, and his recurrent, almost obsessive effort to blunt or deny the commonly held notion that trade was somehow equivalent to theft
