DEFOE AND THE NOVEL: TWO RECENT STUDIES

As Everett Zimmerman's and John J. Richetti's recent books testify, Defoe and Defoe studies present a challenge for the literary critic and scholar even when, apparently, all approaches have been exhausted. With recent studies by Novak, Hunter, and Starr, as well as older ones by Secord, Moore, and Sutherland, it would seem Defoe's very limited body of fiction had been touched at all its sensitive points and with another push would collapse. Yet Defoe studies remain crucial, for several reasons, most of which depend upon a paradox or riddle that each critic attempts to unravel. The paradox is that the very formation of the novel as a genre reached an essential phase in Defoe's handling of fic? tional materials; and yet, at the same time, Defoe is not purely a novelist in the sense Richardson and Fielding, twenty years later, are novelists or fictionalists. In this area, we find decisive issues of literary history, critical questions of genre study, and compelling speculations about what Defoe did, tried to do, or thought he was doing. To seek the begin? ning of the novel in Defoe is like trying to discover the origin of the son? net; once the critic thinks he has it, several other equally plausible ex? planations arise. Professor Zimmerman's book attempts to straddle several of the in? terrelated issues: he is interested in Defoe's relationship to satire and the Augustan satirists; he hopes to elucidate some of the intellectual, literary, and religious traditions to which Defoe belongs; he wants to see Defoe's novels in relation to other eighteenth-century novels and also to place them in their own historical context. The plan is ambitious, and, as