Set on an island in a distant locale, the Nintendo Switch game Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020) borrows game elements from eighteenth-century texts of exploration such as Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726) in its recreation of an island setting. Set into its moment of production, the spring of 2020 and the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the action of playing the game during a moment of social isolation also recreated the action of being Robinson Crusoe, by shaping an island to the liking of the game’s player. Using game studies scholar Ian Bogost’s theories of play as being constructed by the imposition of limitations, this essay explores how Defoe’s text is recreated, both textually and experientially, in the act of playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons during the stay at home period of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the continued interest in narratives of isolation and personal agency.
Critics have long been puzzled by Daniel Defoe’s depictions of Quakers. Praising them in his Review but mocking them in his Quaker-voiced pamphlets, Defoe sketches Quaker characters in his novels that are helpful to his protagonists but are hardly paragons of moral virtue. Some scholars have concluded that he viewed them favorably while others believe he was disparaging them. Neither of these scholarly approaches, however, takes into account how Quakers were actually seen in Defoe’s own era. Not yet regarded in the positive light they would be in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—as benevolent abolitionists and pacifists—late seventeenth- century Quakers were seen as eccentric disrupters of the peace, known for their awkward social deportment and dubious morals. This article proposes that Defoe depicts Quakers as he saw them—as neither paragons of virtue nor overly eccentric. Deploying yet moving beyond standard caricatures of Quakers, Defoe ultimately humanizes them, just as he humanizes other heterogenous “cosmopolitan” characters across his career.
RECOGNITION OF Daniel Defoe’s true diversity and complexity as a writer has increased over the last fifty years in conjunction with an impressive body of scholarship exploring his network of intellectual and creative sources. Modern Defoe scholars have challenged the longstanding belief in the isolated, accidental, and unlearned nature of his achievements as a novelist. They have highlighted the fiction’s continuity with Defoe’s other writings and analyzed his work’s engagement with contemporary conversations on politics, economics, colonization, religion, and national identity. It is now widely acknowledged that Defoe’s work draws on an extensive and varied network of textual sources, and that he read widely and deeply, if idiosyncratically, on his subjects of interest.
Daniel Defoe’s physical appearance was often drawn, but never captured. This essay gathers twenty-two portraits of Defoe that appeared as frontispieces, illustrations or satires during and after his lifetime by fourteen artists and engravers. Each of these portraits may be considered a “version” of Defoe: a construction of the public identity of an author whose security and reputation depended on his anonymity. Their truth lies in the complex historical conditions that produced them. Two strains in particular—the versions of Defoe created by Michael van der Gucht in 1706 and by George Bickham in 1710—are shown to be the sources of many derivative portraits in Britain and France through the nineteenth century. Defoe’s practice of concealing while revealing his identity informed his authorship of fictions such as Robinson Crusoe, in which his earlier portraits in wigs and cloaks are parodied by the frontispiece of a bearded, barefoot author in goatskins and cap. The final version of Defoe in this study is the frontispiece drawn by Eugène Devéria for an edition of Robinson Crusoe that was published in Paris in 1836, in which Defoe, dressed as a gentleman with a full wig and walking stick, stands by the seashore in a pose that replicates that of his most famous fictional character.
This article considers the significance of Jodocus Crull, a writer, compiler, and translator whose reputation as a hack has distracted attention from his two prominent compilations of Russian history. Crull’s first compilation, The Antient and Present State of Muscovy (1698), published at the time of Peter the Great’s diplomatic visit to England, appears to have influenced the prose style of Daniel Defoe and his uncommonly negative portrayals of Sino-Russian relations. Defoe’s writings on travel and trade have been widely discussed. But scholars are less certain about Defoe’s hostility towards the East, which emerges most prominently in his fiction. On his caravan voyage through Siberia in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), Crusoe encounters hordes of “Tartars,” a catch-all term for the Indigenous peoples living between the Chinese and Russian borders. He describes these Tartars as “savages,” echoing the ambiguous terminology he uses to objectify the trespassing cannibals in The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). However, in a fit of rage inconsistent with his previous moral qualms, Crusoe destroys a Tartarian idol, the Great Cham-Chi-Thaungu, to make a mockery of their idol worship, confessing “I was more mov’d at their Stupidity and brutish Worship of a Hobgoblin, than ever I was at any Thing in my Life” (192). Crusoe’s grotesque description of Cham-Chi-Thaungu is taken directly from a similar description of “savage” idolatry in Crull’s Antient and Present State of Muscovy. I contend that in Crusoe’s revenge and elsewhere throughout the sequels, Defoe draws on and adapts Crull’s violent imagery to support his own satirical attack on Chinese culture, downplaying the threat of Eastern imperialism. Crull has been dismissed not only as a hack, but also as a purveyor of salacious, unnecessary violence. Yet Crull’s sadistic and sardonic prose has much in common with Crusoe’s abrupt change in Farther Adventures. Thus, the article first identifies Jodocus Crull as a new source for Defoe’s fiction worth examining; second, it makes the interpretive claim that Crull’s Antient and Present State of Muscovy helps to explain Crusoe’s inconsistent and at times paradoxical thoughts on violence and “savagery” in parts two and three.
This paper is a reply to an article written by Irving N. Rothman, Rakesh Verma, Thomas M. Woodell, and Blake Whitaker—“Defoe’s Contribution to Robert Drury’s Journal: A Stylometric Analysis” (2017). That study claimed to support the consensus of traditional attribution studies that Madagascar; or, Robert Drury’s Journal (1729) is a collaborative work to which Defoe contributed. This paper points out the many flaws of the Rothman group’s attribution study—flaws not only in the nontraditional authorship attribution experimental plan but also in the eighteenth-century literary and editorial production aspects of their paper. Rothman et al.’s work was based on Stieg Hargevik’s non-traditional authorship study of Memoirs of an English Officer which in turn was based on Alver Ellegård’s non-traditional authorship work on the Junius Letters. This paper also explicates the errors carried over by the Rothman group from the Hargevik and Ellegård studies. The conclusion of this paper is that the Rothman group’s results are not valid.
The article revisits a relatively neglected novel in the Defoe canon, Memoirs of a Cavalier. It argues that whilst the Cavalier's political affiliations were certainly not accidental, they could be said to be incidental. And, moreover, that this was a deliberate strategy on the part of the author, designed to undercut any simpler political or cultural affinities which might be found elsewhere in myriad similar “memorials” published in the early years of the eighteenth-century. In short, Defoe presents his readers with a Cavalier who is anything but cavalier. The article first revisits Defoe's literary politics, in order to contextualize the Memoirs, before proceeding to re-read the narrative itself. More closely still it explores the extent to which the narrative realizes the particular aspiration stated in its Preface, to “correct” Clarendon's History of the Rebellion. It closes reflectively, wondering about the possibility that the Cavalier somehow ended up fighting on the wrong side, and perhaps writing on it too.
R.F. Kuang’s bestselling 2022 fantasy novel, Babel, is set in the years leading up to the Opium Wars and chronicles the story of a Cantonese boy who is ferried to Oxford to learn the art of translation—and eventually discovers that his academic work is a tool used by the British imperial project. Kuang’s main character names himself after his favorite writer, Jonathan Swift, and the novel takes on a queer structure that aligns with Swiftian logic. This article examines this transhistorical intertextuality and reads both Swifts together. In so doing, and drawing from queer and Asian American studies work on “sideways”ness, this article argues for a sideways reading practice. This reading practice, the article theorizes and demonstrates, orients the reader obliquely to the text, accounts for narrative nonlinearity, asides, and marginalized perspectives, and challenges the more normative, imperial systems of signification these texts initially seem to propose and ultimately refute.
