Textual Afterlives and Novel Formations: The Case of Defoe`s Roxana

( Soo Min Kim ) 한국근대영미소설학회 2014 근대 영미소설 Vol.21 No.3

This essay investigates the textual afterlives of Daniel Defoe`s Roxana (1724) which was initially anonymous, if commercially profitable, for several decades following its publication. It only belatedly acquired an author in the latter half of the eighteenth-century, more than four decades after the death of the presumed author Defoe. This essay seeks to shed light on how or why this may have been possible by focusing on the publishing environment of eighteenth-century England in which literary production involved numerous agents of which the writer was only one part. In this context, specific attention will be paid to Roxana, Defoe`s last novel, which spawned many revisions and sequels of which Defoe himself seems to have had little to no awareness. Of the many revisions and sequels, the Francis Noble edition of 1775 stands as a particularly fascinating account owing to the fact that it was the first to acknowledge Defoe as the writer of Roxana whilst also being the most drastically altered. It is a curious instance of recognizing and according authorship while negating, or undermining, such notions simultaneously. In this sense, it also stands as an effective example of the unique context of eighteenth-century England in which notions of “authorship” as we know and understand today had yet to be firmly established. As such, this essay considers the meaning and function of the “author” or “authorship” as discussed by Foucault and applies it to the case of Defoe`s Roxana. A study of the publication history of Roxana reveals the figure of “Defoe-the-novelist” to be an invention of which the veracity can be neither confirmed nor denied. In short, what results is a necessary re-assessment of the status of Defoe studies and literary studies in general.

Defoe and Ruins: The Making of British Landscape and Its Temporality

( Inhye Ha ) 한국18세기영문학회 2019 18세기영문학 Vol.16 No.1

This essay investigates Daniel Defoe’s domestic travelogue, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26), with a focus on his deployment of the past and the present. As is well established, A Tour is based on Defoe’s firsthand experience with the southern parts of England and Scotland and his incorporation of other existing sources such as William Camden’s Britannia. I situate my own reading of A Tour alongside previous studies, focusing particularly on the problematic overlap between what Defoe claims to be his original accounts accumulated over the course of many years (and even a decade) and late seventeenth-century topographical literature such as regional surveys and travel narratives. The problematics I explore hinge on the assumption that A Tour is a semi-fictional narrative, one that is crafted to endorse a particular version of modern nationhood Defoe envisions based on the perpetual motion of British commerce and trade. In this context, Defoe’s preoccupation with “decay” and “ruins” provides a telling contrast to the prospect of steady flow of commerce and trade within and outside of the British Isles.

Contagious Texts: Digression and Repetition as Antidote in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year

최자윤 한국18세기영문학회 2016 18세기영문학 Vol.13 No.1

This paper examines the formal experimentation in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) within the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English print culture. Rather than trying to solve the formal conundrum of whether the Journal is fact or fiction (or a strange combination of both), I argue that Defoe includes various texts such as the government’s mortality bills, the quack doctors’ bills, and the mayor’s orders in his narrative to express his concerns about England’s ever-expanding print culture. By demonstrating how printed works closely resemble the bubonic plague in that they quickly spread among London’s citizens and transmit false (and potentially harmful) information, Defoe draws attention to the drastic rise in the number of unreliable publications that circulated in the public sphere due to the lapse in the state’s licensing system. It is my argument that he seeks to counteract such instabilities in the regulatory system by experimenting with the narrative form in the Journal. In addition to using digressions such as those of the three men to contain the untrustworthy information other less credible texts circulate within the narrative, Defoe uses repetition to critically examine and correct the printed instructions the mayor’s office distributes in order to prevent the plague from spreading. In doing so, Defoe develops the formal means by which he establishes the credibility of his account. Although the matter of how successful he was in his efforts remains an issue of contention, I assert that Defoe endeavors to establish print’s authoritative status as a vehicle of knowledge, a cause he both promoted and hinderied throughout his literary career.

Contagious Texts: Digression and Repetition as Antidote in Defoe`s A Journal of the Plague Year

( Ja Yun Choi ) 한국18세기영문학회 2016 18세기영문학 Vol.13 No.1

This paper examines the formal experimentation in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) within the context of seventeenthand eighteenth-century English print culture. Rather than trying to solve the formal conundrum of whether the Journal is fact or fiction (or a strange combination of both), I argue that Defoe includes various texts such as the government’s mortality bills, the quack doctors’ bills, and the mayor’s orders in his narrative to express his concerns about England’s ever-expanding print culture. By demonstrating how printed works closely resemble the bubonic plague in that they quickly spread among London’s citizens and transmit false (and potentially harmful) information, Defoe draws attention to the drastic rise in the number of unreliable publications that circulated in the public sphere due to the lapse in the state’s licensing system. It is my argument that he seeks to counteract such instabilities in the regulatory system by experimenting with the narrative form in the Journal. In addition to using digressions such as those of the three men to contain the untrustworthy information other less credible texts circulate within the narrative, Defoe uses repetition to critically examine and correct the printed instructions the mayor’s office distributes in order to prevent the plague from spreading. In doing so, Defoe develops the formal means by which he establishes the credibility of his account. Although the matter of how successful he was in his efforts remains an issue of contention, I assert that Defoe endeavors to establish print’s authoritative status as a vehicle of knowledge, a cause he both promoted and hinderied throughout his literary career.

남해로 가는 길 : 로빈슨 크루소 삼부작에서 읽는 자본주의의 거품기 작동 이야기

전인한 ( Jeon In-han ) 영미문학연구회 2021 안과 밖 Vol.- No.51

This paper aims to examine Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe Trilogy, that is, Robinson Crusoe (1719), The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720), and Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720), as a meta-narrative that justifies Daniel Defoe’s conviction about the British venture into the South Seas. Daniel Defoe strongly believes that Britain’s success as a trading nation depends on the successful venture into the South Seas. His last novel, A New Voyage Round the World (1724), is literary propaganda for his conviction about the South Seas where, the anonymous speaker asserts, there are ample opportunities to gather infinite wealth free from the law of scarcity. This paper argues that Robinson Crusoe Trilogy serves as the passage to the South Seas because Defoe reveals in these novels why his island is a failure as a colony, how fierce is the competition for advantageous trade in the China Sea, and why it is impossible to have the favourable balance of trade with China, the master of 18th-century global commerce. Robinson Crusoe Trilogy expresses Defoe’s argument as a mercantilist, this paper suggests, that Britain should establish free and advantageous trade with a region where there are favourable conditions for trade. Robinson Crusoe Trilogy becomes the passage to the South Seas because Defoe, through the adventures of Robinson Crusoe, argues this fantastic region is indeed the South Seas. However, this paper contends, through making promises about the future venture into the South Seas, Defoe becomes entangled with the capitalism working the whipping machine, as capitalism operates by making promises about the future (attracting investment/raising debt), converting that promise (investment/debt) into stock, and postponing the realization of the promise while inflating the share price. By fantasizing about a South Seas that is free from the law of scarcity but cannot exist in reality, Defoe implicates himself unwittingly with the South Sea Bubble which comes to burst in 1721.

디포의 이상

김성룡(KIM Sung-Nyong) 장로회신학대학교 기독교사상과 문화연구원 2018 장신논단 Vol.50 No.3

다니엘 디포와 근대 개인주의: 『록사나』를 중심으로

이혜수 ( Hye Soo Lee ) 한국근대영미소설학회 2014 근대 영미소설 Vol.21 No.3

This essay intervenes in and complicates the discussion that a distinguishing aspect of Daniel Defoe`s novels lies in their trenchant grasp of modern individualism by reading Roxana. Defoe`s conception and representation of modern individualism in Roxana are not fully explicated by what has been considered the hallmark of his individualism, that is, economic individualism and Protestant interiority. The eponymous heroine of Roxana is, like most hero/ines of Defoe`s other novels, a survivor of adversities and deprivations through her own resources and personal capacity; she seeks to be an autonomous and independent self regardless of the external environments. Yet while Roxana`s hard-acquired autonomy, which is initially predicated on her willful determination to be apart from morality, empowers and enables her to pursue a higher ambition, it also turns out to involve some necessary anxiety, guilty feelings, or self-alienation as the story goes on. The last part of the novel, in which Roxana`s name-sake daughter Susan haunts her and tries to reveal her identity as Roxana, stands as a compelling vignette that shows the nightmarish, repetitive, and unconscious underside of the enlightenment of modern individualism. Defoe`s last novel, the last Susan scene in particular, allows us to see that Defoe`s vision of modern individualism might be much more complex, ambiguous and ambivalent than is usually conceived.

Technological and Narrative Inventions in Defoe’s The Consolidator

( Ja Yun Choi ) 한국근대영미소설학회 2018 근대 영미소설 Vol.25 No.1

This article examines the literary significance of the “strange” inventions in Daniel Defoe’s fantastic lunar narrative The Consolidator. While critics often comment that these fantastic devices help Defoe’s narrator better understand the problems plaguing the English government in their discussion of the text as a political allegory, they rarely discuss exactly how these machines grant their users such enhanced insight, which I examine by relating them to Defoe’s literary techne. In addition to using the strange technological inventions to illustrate his mild parody of the “strange, therefore true” trope, Defoe employs them as direct analogies for his narrative inventions. I argue it is through such analogies that Defoe expresses his concern regarding the extensive use of imagination, resulting in his adherence to the standards of empiricism in his later imaginary narratives. His imaginative creation of the strange devices to contemplate the most effective way to delivering the “truth” about England not only situates his lunar narrative within the tradition of using the sense of possibility that accompanied sea travel to engage in imaginative speculations, but also helps link The Consolidator to his much better-known work Robinson Crusoe and thereby demonstrates its valuable contribution to Defoe’s literary canon.

Defoe and Ruins: The Making of British Landscape and Its Temporality

하인혜 한국18세기영문학회 2019 18세기영문학 Vol.16 No.1

This essay investigates Daniel Defoe’s domestic travelogue, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26), with a focus on his deployment of the past and the present. As is well established, A Tour is based on Defoe’s firsthand experience with the southern parts of England and Scotland and his incorporation of other existing sources such as William Camden’s Britannia. I situate my own reading of A Tour alongside previous studies, focusing particularly on the problematic overlap between what Defoe claims to be his original accounts accumulated over the course of many years (and even a decade) and late seventeenth-century topographical literature such as regional surveys and travel narratives. The problematics I explore hinge on the assumption that A Tour is a semi-fictional narrative, one that is crafted to endorse a particular version of modern nationhood Defoe envisions based on the perpetual motion of British commerce and trade. In this context, Defoe’s preoccupation with “decay” and “ruins” provides a telling contrast to the prospect of steady flow of commerce and trade within and outside of the British Isles.

The Angst of the Homo Oeconomicus: Capitalism and Contrition in Daniel Defoe’s Roxana

( Kwang Taek Han ) 한국18세기영문학회 2014 18세기영문학 Vol.11 No.2

By focusing on how Defoe represents and critiques Roxana`s thoroughcapitalistic rationality which fabricates a convincing self-defensivenarrative in Roxana, I argue that the novel reveals the author`s deepangst of a new mode of self-fashioning of homo oeconomicus. Theauthenticity of Roxana`s confessional but specious autobiographicalnarrative remains a critical conundrum due to its salient incongruity withthe typical Protestant introspective self-discipline predicated on Christianinstruction. Roxana`s seemingly remorseful remarks and confessions,which appear with a suspicious frequency in the novel, contradictthemselves, as her peculiar narrative structure and strategy are indicativeof a surreptitious intention of weaving her past nefarious acts into afeigned repentance to the aim of camouflaging her unvarying immoralityand unceasing sexual and material desire. In Roxana Defoe captures anddelves into the increasing tension between Protestant and material valuesin the newly emergent modern capitalism of his age, as well as itseffect on the way in which the modern individual concocts a plausiblenarrative for herself. Moralism and materialism are, for Defoe, to beconcatenated into a fabricated self-defensive narrative in the age of newhomo oeconomicus.