Chapter 18 - Anonymous Defoe

Summary

This essay explores the strange, winding, and sometimes hotly debated formation of the Defoe canon in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It pays particular attention to the state of Defoe attributions in the twenty-first century. What emerges from tracing the history of Defoe’s anonymous productions, their circulation, and processes of attribution is an ongoing transformation in our sense of Defoe as an author. Whether we know Defoe primarily as a proto-novelist or as a political pamphleteer is much more a product of the processes by which anonymous works have been attributed to him than a reflection of what he may actually have written.