Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Other Narratives

Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Other Narratives: Finding 'The Thing Itself' explores important problems in the fiction of Daniel Defoe, from his interest in rendering reality (what he called "the Thing itself"), whether in painting or prose fiction, to the various ways in which Defoe's works were read by contemporaries and by those novelists who attempted to imitate and comment upon his Life and Strange Surprizing Adventure of Robinson Crusoe decades after its publication. A number of sections of the book attempt to consider the complexities of various aspects of Defoe's writings: his way of evoking the inability of language to describe a vivid scene or moments of overwhelming emotion, his interest in the fiction of islands or utopia, his gradual development of the concepts surrounding Crusoe's cave, Defoe's fascination for the horrors of cannibalism, and some of the ways he attempted to defend his work and serious fiction in general. Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Other Narratives: Finding 'The Thing Itself' establishes the complexities and originality of Defoe as a writer of fiction.