Although in recent years John Robert Moore's landmark Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe (1960) has been cast into a very doubtful light, it provided what was for some time regarded as a reasonably reliable account of what Defoe wrote and when. The publication of The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (1988) by P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, however, has more or less definitively problematized that list, especially since Furbank and Owens simply enunciated at length and systematized doubts that had already been voiced about Moore's Checklist. The question of what is to be done in Defoe scholarship, however, remains to be answered.

Furbank and Owens are preparing their own, presumably much scaled down, list of Defoe's writings, but the appearance of that work will undoubtedly be only the beginning of a long debate in which other scholars will insist on additional attributions, and all of those arguments will have to be assessed by yet other scholars. In the meantime, discussion of Defoe proceeds. If, however, one looks at the problem of the Defoe canon and its relationship to the study of the early English novel from a Foucauldian perspective, the problem seems less serious than it otherwise might. Foucault has challenged our automatic resort to the concept of “author” and recommended instead that we describe and analyze discursive formations instead of focusing on writers, careers, or bodies of work; for Foucault, “the function of an author is to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society.”