Preface
Introduction
Ch 1: "Strange Relations"
Ch 2: "Meer Manage": The Performing Self
Ch 3: "What am I a Whore for now?": The Compulsive Self
Ch 4: "Trusty Agents": The Divided Self
Epilogue: Discovering the Self
Coda
Works Cited
Elizabeth R. Napier is professor of English and American literatures at Middlebury College.
Napier's study of Daniel Defoe is literary criticism at its best:
attentive to text, informed (but not dominated) by theory, written
in lucid—indeed lyrical—prose. Napier begins with Defoe's
complicated invocations of genre in the major fiction. Spiritual
autobiography jockeys for interpretive dominance with picaresque
fiction in Robinson Crusoe; criminal biography wars with conduct
literature for narrative control of Moll Flanders and Roxana. Such
generic instability demonstrates the difficulty of telling a story
of self, a point further emphasized by accounts that are changed in
the retelling or that never get fully told in the first place. From
the first chapter's introduction of the problem of the narrative
(and narrating) self, Napier moves on to chapters centered on
dominant versions of the self in Defoe: the performing self, the
compulsive self, the divided self. Each chapter provides ample
evidence that the problematic of accounting for the self in these
various ways is evident in all of Defoe's major fiction, though,
predictably, Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana receive the
most detailed attention. Napier's elegant, comprehensive, judicious
study fully convinces that accounting for the self is a central
concern of Defoe's major fiction. Summing Up: Essential.
Lower-division undergraduates and above.
*CHOICE*
Throughout this study, Napier’s knowledge of scholarship on Defoe’s
major fictions and her breadth of commentary on novel theory as it
relates to narration and the construction of the self are as
thorough asthey are comprehensive.... Ultimately her argument is
strong and clear... [T]his work is a valuable contribution to the
study of Defoe’s major fiction.
*Eighteenth-Century Fiction*
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