Chapter 6 - Defoe and the Novel

Summary

This chapter maps the literary terrain that Defoe’s novels entered into and considers his position in literary history as the so-called father of the English novel. While Defoe would come to be associated with the emergence of a new style of realist fiction, he draws on, combines, and exploits the audience for popular generic forms, including romances, travel and adventure tales, romans à clef, pirate chronicles, jest books, collections of anecdotes, and criminal biographies. Extending his non-fictional work, Defoe experimented with narrative strategies to capture everyday experience – an artistic aim we now associate with various forms of realism. Provocative from the start, Defoe’s novels earned detractors and defenders but were recognized as central to the English canon as early as the turn of the nineteenth century. The chapter traces Defoe’s significance to the work of both practitioners and scholars of the novel form, including Virginia Woolf and J. M. Coetzee.