Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Other Narratives: Finding The Thing Itself

Maximillian E. Novak

Rowman & Littlefield, Oct 24, 2014 - Literary Criticism - 240 pages

This book explores significant problems in the fiction of Daniel Defoe. Maximillian E. Novak investigates a number of elements in Defoe’s work by probing his interest in rendering of reality (what Defoe called “the Thing itself”). Novak examines Defoe’s interest in the relationship between prose fiction and painting, as well as the various ways in which Defoe’s woks were read by contemporaries and by those novelists who attempted to imitate and comment upon his Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe decades after its publication. In this book, Novak attempts to consider the uniqueness and imaginativeness of various aspects of Defoe’s writings including his way of evoking the seeming inability of language to describe a vivid scene or moments of overwhelming emotion, his attraction to the fiction of islands and utopias, his gradual development of the concepts surrounding Crusoe’s cave, his fascination with the horrors of cannibalism, and some of the ways he attempted to defend his work and serious fiction in general. Most of all, Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Other Narratives establishes the complexity and originality of Defoe as a writer of fiction.

Contents

• Introduction: 1
• 1 Defoe as an Innovator of Fictional Form: 15
• 2 Picturing the Thing Itself or Not: 43
• 3 The Unmentionable and the Ineffable in Defoes Fiction: 61
• 4 Novel or Fictional Memoir: 79
• 5 Meatless Fridays: 95
• 6 Edenic Desires: 111
• 7 Strangely Surprizd by Robinson Crusoe: 129
• 8 Looking with Wonder upon the Sea: 139
• 9 The Cave and the Grotto: 159
• 10 The Sum of Humane Misery?: 181
• 11 Ideological Tendencies in Three Crusoe Narratives by British Novelists during the Period Following the French Revolution: 197
• Afterword: 215
• Bibliography: 225
• Index: 235
• About the Author: 239

About the author

Maximillian E. Novak is distinguished research professor of English, emeritus, at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Other Narratives: Finding The Thing Itself
• Author: Maximillian E. Novak
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014
• ISBN: 1611494869, 9781611494860
• Length: 240 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Literary Figures; Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Literary Criticism / European / General