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The institution of the English novel: Defoe's contribution

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From: Novel
Date: 19960401
Author:Brown, Homer

Astute and careful readers, even when acknowledging that what we now call the novel did not then exist, proceed as if Daniel Defoe were seized by the dynamics of the genre he unselfconsciously employed. Indeed, arguably none of us has been free of the platonic ideality or natural/supernatural power of form in our reading of Defoe, and it is this insistent force of genre that has given us the picture of the bumbling, artless, near illiterate, political journalist/hack, chronic liar, who stumbled into the invention of the novel somewhat on the model of the man who invents the telephone and ...

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