Captain Singleton : An Epic of Mitsein ?

Abstract

The history of the novel in England is conventionally understood to go hand in hand with the rise of individualism. Ian Watt is only the most influential of critics to link the novelistic form—and above all Defoe's Robinson Crusoe—with the prioritizing of a distinctively modern self freed from social constraints and dependencies. For Watt, this radical and even excessive individualism at the origins of the novel had to be tempered by the marriage plot as exemplified by Richardson, but this paper argues that already in the Defoe canon, in Captain Singleton, it is possible to locate an alternative model, an interrogation of "Being-With" alongside the "epic of solitude" that founds the English novel. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, this piece imagines what might have unfolded had Watt taken Captain Singleton rather than Robinson Crusoe as the revolutionary precursor to the novelistic tradition.