7 - “History” before Defoe: Nashe, Deloney, Behn, Manley

Summary

Two different sets of developments that animated English culture in the early modern period converged in the career of Daniel Defoe. The first was the transformation of history that eventuated in Baconian historiography; this process has been treated at length, and historiography will again be the focus in the next chapter, where Defoe's historical practice will be discussed. We must now turn to the second set of developments: the history of English fiction in the seventeenth century and particularly the debate, in theoretical statements and in imaginative works, over the relationship between history and fiction that can be said to have begun with Sidney's Apology for Poetry and to have reached an important watershed in the works of Defoe. Sidney insisted on the absolute difference between history and poetry, believing that this distinction redounded to the glory of poetry, and Defoe wrote fictional texts that he presented to readers as histories and that only later came to be read as novels. Although scarcely touched upon thus far in this study, the debate over the nature of fiction is crucial to understanding the emergence of the discourse of the novel. Up to now, I have left this debate to one side; as the principal goal of this work is to elucidate the relationship between historical discourse and the discourse of the novel, it was necessary to treat historiography at length before turning to fiction. We now turn, however, from historical discourse to the nature of “history,” a form of fiction that asserted its difference from and opposition to romance and stipulated a claim to historicity even as it acknowledged its imaginative status.