Chapter 7 - Defoe and Popular Fiction

Summary

This chapter examines what ‘popular’ and ‘fiction’ may have meant to Defoe before ‘popular fiction’ was a generic category, and then looks at Defoe’s own fictions as an anxious attempt to avoid alignment with those established forms of literature known and demonized as ‘romances’ and ‘novels’. Defoe takes the sex out and puts the ‘history’ in, along with a large moral dose of religious prophylaxis; the whore biography and criminal/pirate life were alike turned into moralistic stories of economic redemption. Yet, given his status as a businessman and exile from elite literary circles, Defoe’s resistance to popular fiction was ambivalent, and he was always aware of the supplementary pleasures of his texts. The individual survival stories, with their incident-rich, class-dissolving, non-classical mode of contemporary, evolving prose, were of high price but often rendered ‘popular’ by the publishing industry itself, which filleted them for chapbook consumption by any literate person.