Content area
Full Text
Paul Baines. Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders. A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism. Houndmills, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. $20.95 (paper).
It once was possible to raise an ironic smile in academic circles with a remark about the "Defoe industry," but the abundance of Defoe criticism since Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957) has taken the humor out of the joke. Several talented scholars, notably Novak, Backscheider, Richetti, Hunter, Starr, and Pat Rogers, have devoted substantial portions of their academic careers to mapping the life of Defoe and the formal strains of his writings, while others have contributed monographs. Owens and Furbank have reduced the size of the Defoe canon and stimulated the intertextual study of his work through their Pickering Masters edition, while a team led by Novak has meticulously prepared the initial volumes of the Stoke Newington critical edition. A new Defoe Society holds out the promise of a congeniality that has sometimes been wanting in Defoe studies. This reader's guide to the criticism of Defoe's two most famous novels is a welcome introduction to all this activity.
After a brief life of Defoe and short publication history of...