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Perhaps the major problem in attempting to place Defoe in his time involves a more precise definition of Defoe's relation with his audience … we may never discover in the fragmentary records we have what enabled Defoe to find a style which his contemporaries recognized as original and exciting and which brought the end of the romance and the beginning of the novel.
Maximillian Novak, “Defoe,” in The English Novel: Select Bibliographical Guides, ed. A. E. Dyson (London, 1974), p. 30To understand the true Meaning of any ancient Writing, we ought to be acquainted with the Usages and Customs of the Time and Nation in which it was wrote, those Accidents and Circumstances which occasioned the writing of it, and (since the Sense of Words is continually changing), the Meaning in which such and such Words were used at the Time when the Author flourished.
?Defoe, A Collection of Miscellany Letters Selected out of Mist's Weekly Journal (1722–7), 2: 114Discourse in the novel is structured on an uninterrupted mutual interaction with the discourse of life.
M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, Tex., 1981), p. 383Poetry … is perpetual confrontation of lexicon with the world of things.
Jan Mukařovsky, “Poetic Reference,” in Semiotics of Art, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Irwin R. Titunik (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), p. 162Defoe lived in a period notably troubled and greatly fascinated by crime.
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