Style Substance And The Status Of The Defoe Canon FINAL

Seager, Nicholas

Abstract

This article re-attributes to Daniel Defoe (c.1660–1731) one pamphlet and confirms his authorship of three works currently listed as ‘probable’ attributions, including one substantial book. More generally, it proposes refinements to authorship attribution methods with reference to Defoe’s widely disputed canon, a canon recognised as a special case which has implications for how we assign authorship of anonymous topical material from the late seventeenth and eighteenth century more generally. In particular, it contends that impressionistic evaluation should be discounted and that close parallels with securely ascribed works, sometimes amounting to direct self-borrowing, should be better recognised and given more evidentiary weight. The article presents new external evidence for its examples, which licenses a fuller assessment of internal features, namely style and substance. It reappraises the evidence for Defoe’s authorship of The Justice and Necessity of a War with Holland and The Present State of the Parties in Great Britain (both 1712) by attending to how their polemical strategies align to Defoe’s aims in other writings, and how the latter reproduces material Defoe used elsewhere. The article ends with a summary and assessment of changes to the Defoe canon since the publication of Furbank and Owens’s Critical Bibliography (1998), this amounting to six additions (two new and four re-attributions), five transferrals from ‘probable’ to ‘certain’ authorship, and one removal.

Citation

Seager, N. (in press). Style Substance And The Status Of The Defoe Canon FINAL. The Library,

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: May 8, 2024
• Deposit Date: Jun 3, 2024
• Print ISSN: 0024-2160
• Electronic ISSN: 1744-8581
• Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Public URL: https://keele-repository.worktribe.com/output/845382