Crime and Defoe: A New Kind of Writing

Lincoln B. Faller

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511553455

This book seeks to recover something of the original excitement, challenge and significance of Defoe's four novels of criminal life by reading them within and against the conventions of early eighteenth-century criminal biography. Crime raised deeply troubling questions in Defoe's time, not least as a powerful sign of the breakdown of traditional social authority and order. Arguing that Defoe's novels, like criminal biography, provided ways of facing and working through, as well as avoiding, certain of the moral and intellectual difficulties that crime raised for him and his readers, Faller shows how the 'literary', even 'aesthetic' qualities of his fiction contributed to these ends. Analysing the ways in which Defoe's novels exploited, deformed and departed from the genre they imitated, this book attempts to define the specific social and political (which is to say moral and ideological) value of a given set of 'literary' texts against those of a more 'ordinary' form of narrative.

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Crime and Defoe

A New Kind of Writing

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Contents

Frontmatter
pp i-viii

Contents
pp ix-x

Preface
pp xi-xviii

List of abbreviations
pp xix-xx

1 - Romancing the real: the “field” of criminal biography
pp 1-31

2 - Defoe's realism: rough frames, strange voices, surprisingly various subjects and readers made more present to themselves
pp 32-75

3 - The copious text: opening the door to inference, or, room for those who know how to read it
pp 76-109

4 - Intimations of an invisible hand: the mind exercised, enlarged, and kept in play by strange concurrences
pp 110-136

5 - The general scandal upon business: unanswerable doubts, and the text as a field supporting very nice distinctions
pp 137-166

6 - The frontiers of dishonesty, the addition and concurrence of circumstances: more on the strategic situating of names
pp 167-199

7 - Notions different from all the world: criminal stupidity, the self, and the symbolic order
pp 200-244

Closing comments: truth, complexity, common sense, and empty spaces
pp 245-258

Index
pp 259-263

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A New Kind of Writing

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