Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Defoe: the man in the works
- 2 Defoe’s political and religious journalism
- 3 Defoe, commerce, and empire
- 4 Defoe and criminal fiction
- 5 Money and character in Defoe’s fiction
- 6 Defoe’s Tour and the identity of Britain
- 7 Defoe as narrative innovator
- 8 Gender and fiction in Moll Flanders and Roxana
- 9 Defoe and London
- 10 Robinson Crusoe: varieties of fictional experience
- 11 Defoe: satirist and moralist
- 12 Defoe and poetic tradition
- Further Reading
- Index
7 - Defoe as narrative innovator
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2009
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Defoe: the man in the works
- 2 Defoe’s political and religious journalism
- 3 Defoe, commerce, and empire
- 4 Defoe and criminal fiction
- 5 Money and character in Defoe’s fiction
- 6 Defoe’s Tour and the identity of Britain
- 7 Defoe as narrative innovator
- 8 Gender and fiction in Moll Flanders and Roxana
- 9 Defoe and London
- 10 Robinson Crusoe: varieties of fictional experience
- 11 Defoe: satirist and moralist
- 12 Defoe and poetic tradition
- Further Reading
- Index
Summary
Defoe's fiction is traditionally labeled “realistic.” But realism is a slippery notion. Once we move beyond basic biological circumstances, “reality” manifests itself as a historically variable entity that can be defined only tentatively according to prevailing philosophical, social, economic, and technological conditions. From antiquity onwards European literature had vividly represented many of those fundamental life events and physical needs - alimentary, sexual, and excretory for example - that readers immediately recognize and mark as “realistic.” Traditionally, however, such representations were until relatively modern times relegated to the lower genres in the hierarchy of literary value that extended downwards from epic and tragedy, poetic genres that featured as their actors gods and heroes, to the lesser forms of mostly comic prose genres peopled by ordinary folk doing ordinary (and amusing) things. Defoe's narratives certainly offer accounts of the lives of ordinary people, some of them socially marginal or even criminal, but his fiction is never realistic in the simple sense of representing basic human functions like sex or excretion or physical decay, although two of his novels, Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724), are about women who have many sexual partners (even if their descriptions of sexual acts are extremely reticent and even prudish). But the rendering of the particulars of experience, especially human biological facts, is not where his “realistic” originality lies. Defoe's “realism” as a novelist comes in his vivid evocation of individuals as they examine the conditions of their existence and explore what it means to be a person in particularized social and historical circumstances. Looking back on their lives, his characters discover the nature of their particular reality.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe , pp. 121 - 138Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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