There are three intellectual catalysts to this chapter. The first is Daniel Defoe's The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). It could have been almost any cultural artefact, but the eighteenth century is a rich source of examples of this kind: that is, texts whose readings have radically changed from their first appearance. Like Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver, 1726), Robinson Crusoe is today often presented as a children's book and its original political bearing is forgotten outside of scholarship. What it is taken to communicate has thus changed in time, despite the text retaining identical words in successive publications. If one wishes to begin to excavate what Robinson Crusoe communicated to its original audience, an audience no longer available for questioning, it is therefore necessary to examine the contemporary discourses that surrounded that text and which might have provided at least the co-ordinates for understanding what it communicated, especially regarding allegory, economy, industry and instructions for good living.

The second catalyst is also articulated with reference to an eighteenth-century text, Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67). The issue is slightly different, here. What is in question is a representative device: clearly, at one level, Sterne's novel is a reaction to proto-realism in the eighteenth century, a refusal to swallow the claims to verisimilitude of fictional representations which purport to parcel up time and space into equal, digestible portions.