Primary Work

Roxana by Daniel Defoe

"Few works written in the eighteenth century have enjoyed the type of critical reevaluation experienced over the last three decades by Daniel Defoe's last fiction, Roxana (1724). So shabby was its estimation in 1970 that Robert D. Hume could seriously pose the question "The Conclusion of Defoe's Roxana: Fiasco or Tour de Force?" and expect an overwhelming majority of his readers to choose the former. Recent critics, however, have, like Hume himself, overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Roxana's reception over these decades in fact tells us much about the changing nature of eighteenth-century studies itself. Whereas the novel never really fit within a critical vocabulary that would describe the eighteenth century as the Enlightenment Era, Age of Reason, Augustan Age, and so on, it has found a home in what has been recently described as the new eighteenth century: "not so much an age of reason, but one of paranoia, repression, and incipient madness, for which Jeremy Bentham's malign, all-seeing Panopticon, grimly refurbished by Foucault, might stand as a fitting, nightmarish emblem." Scholars who sought to view the period as essentially backward-looking, obedient to an artistic legacy descended from Aristotle and Horace, found little to admire in Roxana. Scholars seeking to view the period as essentially forward-looking, even postmodern in its own right, have found plenty indeed."

Jesse M. Molesworth, "A Dreadful Course of Calamities: Roxana's Ending Reconsidered," ELH, 2007, Vol. 74