Defoe'sEssay upon Literatureand Eighteenth-Century Histories of Mediation

Abstract

Questions of divine intercession and the human transmission of God's word were central to Enlightenment debates about what we would now call media. De foe's neglected Essay upon Literature begins as an argument for the divine origins of writing, but its focus on writing as God's git to humans gives way to a new kind of history, concerned with the development of human communications (oral tradition, writing systems, the invention of printing, and so on). By identifying histories of mediation, like Defoe's, as a distinct genre, we see new links between texts by such wildly diverse authors as Edward Stillingleet, William Temple, William Warburton, Adam Smith, and the Marquis de Con dorcet. Defoe's attempt to articulate an emergent area of intellectual inquiry and his understanding of literature as writing in general rather than as a subcategory of writing challenge us to think through our own generic classiications and hierarchies in the digital age.