Textual Afterlives and Novel Formations: The Case of Defoe’s Roxana

Abstract

This essay investigates the textual afterlives of Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724) which was initially anonymous, if commercially profitable, for several decades following its publication. It only belatedly acquired an author in the latter half of the eighteenth-century, more than four decades after the death of the presumed author Defoe. This essay seeks to shed light on how or why this may have been possible by focusing on the publishing environment of eighteenth-century England in which literary production involved numerous agents of which the writer was only one part. In this context, specific attention will be paid to Roxana, Defoe’s last novel, which spawned many revisions and sequels of which Defoe himself seems to have had little to no awareness. Of the many revisions and sequels, the Francis Noble edition of 1775 stands as a particularly fascinating account owing to the fact that it was the first to acknowledge Defoe as the writer of Roxana whilst also being the most drastically altered. It is a curious instance of recognizing and according authorship while negating, or undermining, such notions simultaneously. In this sense, it also stands as an effective example of the unique context of eighteenth-century England in which notions of “authorship” as we know and understand today had yet to be firmly established. As such, this essay considers the meaning and function of the “author” or “authorship” as discussed by Foucault and applies it to the case of Defoe’s Roxana. A study of the publication history of Roxana reveals the figure of “Defoe-the-novelist” to be an invention of which the veracity can be neither confirmed nor denied. In short, what results is a necessary re-assessment of the status of Defoe studies and literary studies in general.