Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Other Fictions: Finding “The Thing Itself.” Maximillian E. Novak. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2015. Pp. x+238 (original) (raw)
This volume brings together eleven essays on Robinson Crusoe published by Maximillian E. Novak in journals and colloquia between 1996 and 2012. Each essay explores a different way of raising the vexed question of the nature of Defoe's "realism"-the distinguishing quality of his fiction that many readers have experienced, but few can convincingly define. In an introductory essay that provides a retrospective of his career, Novak recalls his arrival at Oxford in the mid-1950s to begin his graduate studies. He was drawn to work on Defoe in two ways: he wanted to understand "Defoe's world and the ways in which he saw the problems of his time" and also "the methods by which Defoe succeeded in creating a sense of the real" (2). The first of these interests led to Novak's groundbreaking works of historical criticism, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (1962) and Defoe and the Nature of Man (1963); the second led to Realism, Myth and History in Defoe's Fiction (1983) and to the essays in the volume under review. For Novak, each of these questions is answered in terms of the other: that is, what is real about Defoe's fiction is that it is set firmly in a historical context, while the historicity is subordinated to an enlivening personal consciousness. Defoe's fictional histories use "a variety of devices for evoking the real through awakening the imagination of the reader, asking him/her to see what was not fully in the text" (5). It is the variety of Defoe's devices for stimulating the reader's imagination that Novak explores through these essays. One device that Defoe adapted from the visual arts is the representation of ordinary objects and persons in paintings. In an early essay on the novel, Sir Walter Scott noted the influence on Defoe of the Dutch and Flemish realist painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who represented
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