Serious Reflections on Daniel Defoe (with an Excursus on the Farther Adventures of Ian Watt and Two Notes on the Present State of Literary Studies) J. Paul Hunter Daniel Defoe—we keep saying, generation after generation—is notthe man we took him for. People said it in his lifetime, as his activities and career unfolded in loose and unpredicted ways, and, over the centuries since, new Defoes keep emerging as readers find faces and minds that earlier readings and commentators had not prepared them for. Friends say it, or former friends, or those who believed they shared views and values with him, and so do foes or those who have been pushed to confront his restless and ambitious mind andpursue itin new andunexpected directions. The process of redefining Defoe—of trying to find some unpeeled self at the core ofa project or text—has been vexed overthe years by many things: the canon wars, the redefinition ofwhat counts as literary, the reconfiguring of disciplinarities, and the foibles of intellectual and moral fashion. Trying to find the "real" Daniel Defoe has been a lot like the process of trying to trace a stable idea of selfhood itself in Western thought: we have not always known when we have found a new development or a genuinely changed perspective, and we have not always known exactly what it was we were looking for. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 228 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Different as he may seem now from the homo economicus of Ian Watt or the Mr Everytext of John Robert Moore, the present Defoe seems more robust and durable than ever. His current high esteem relative to other more strictly belletristic eighteenth-century writers says much about the depth of changes that have occurred in literary and historical studies, changes that could be represented in terms of gender, genre, ideology, thematics, or quite a few other ways. I will settle for just one representation. When Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel appeared forty-three years ago, eighteenthcentury literature was prominent in the curriculum in most of the major research universities in the English-speaking world, but the distinguished professors who taught it did their research on Johnson, Pope, or Swift (or occasionally drama) rather than on novels or other upstart genres. Lots of very good people worked on novels in those years—James Sutherland and Alan McKillop, for example—but you did not get to be George Sherburn, Bertrand Bronson, R.S. Crane, EW. Bateson, Louis Landa, John Butt, or Maynard Mack by doing so, not even if you were Ian Watt. F I once had a colleague who repeatedly enlivened job interviews by asking candidates what academic book they would most like to rewrite and how they would do it. It brought out the best in some candidates (not in others), but I was always intrigued by its implications of contextual more than authorial difference, and this essay actually began in what I now regard as a misguided attempt to rethink what I tried to do in my first book half a lifetime ago, a would-be Reluctant Pilgrim's Progress. I say "misguided" because I came to see that, although I had accumulated a long list of omissions, complaints, and mistaken assumptions to correct, you cannot simply take a book conceived in one moment and wrench it into another without confronting how the whole river, the whole underlying set of critical and philosophical and cultural assumptions, has changed. So for better and worse my early work on Defoe is going to have to continue to shift for itself in its own inadequate 1 966 assumptions rather than my present inadequate assumptions. Instead, what I want to do here is return to thinking about Defoe by asking how we are now able, in the present set of critical, historical, and intellectual circumstances more generally, to confront him differently. In effect I want to ask what some of the directions of scholarship for Defoe might consist in for the immediate future. And to do that, I have reconfronted an old model and nemesis, Watt's The Rise of the Novel, a book that...