The publication of Robinson Crusoe in 1719 was an extraordinary event in the history of literature. There had been prose narratives before this book, but never so sustained a fictional account of one individual’s experiences. This man’s story was singular and new. What distinguished Robinson Crusoe were elements that now seem essential to the novel as a genre. It told of an ordinary individual, even if his ordeals were extraordinary. It placed great emphasis on his inner life, though understood mostly in spiritual terms. And, above all, in the very manner of its narration, it asked the reader to believe in its “probability. In the first decades of the English novel, this was the most common word for what made a narrative believable. In the case of Robinson Crusoe, it involved the narrator’s unwavering commitment to minute, objective description and circumstantial detail, Daniel Defoe’s brilliantly unliterary prose doing justice to the facts of one particular person’s experience.
So the novel begins as if it were a true story. Yet Defoe’s fiction was not noticed by contemporary literary critics, and not included in discussions of the best literature of the age. From the number of editions that were published we know that his fiction was popular, but it was not regarded as properly literary. Many of his novels were lumped together in the public imagination with this published accounts of criminal lives that were popular in the period. Readers were not yet aware that a new genre was with them. The preface to Robinson Crusoe has many words for the narratiyetsStocil Adventures Account Slited History Cact – but none of them is that word novel’. It is significant that readers did not yet use this word to describe this new genre. The noun existed, but it referred to what we might call a short story or novellara genre of brief tales often or forbidden romantic entanglements, usually published in collections Many of the leasing writers on these were women of whom Deinrivière Manley and Eliza Haywood were the most famous. Defoe’s last novel Roxana, the fictional memoir of a Restoration courtesan, owes something to this briefly dominant sub-genre of prose fiction, featuring as it does the scandalous affairs of courtly men and women.
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