The Rise of the Novel and Dis-/Example in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

Abstract

This paper explores Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) through the lens of Lennard J. Davis’s double discourse of a criminal—as a dis-example to be avoided and, simultaneously, as an example to be imitated. Briefly but effectively, this study also examines and compares the popularity of the novel in eighteenth-century Britain with that of the web novel in twenty-first-century South Korea: The former can be deciphered as a literary and cultural response to socio-cultural changes in the era, characterized by the decline in patronage, changes in the location of reading, the rise of literacy, the growth of the print market, and the extension of readership; the latter can be depicted as a new form of literary response and a cultural phenomenon that mirrors the technological shift triggered/accelerated by the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The phenomenon of the emergence of the novel embodies changes/revolutions in eighteenth-century British society/culture. Despite the novel’s popularity as entertainment, and/or because of its immense popularity among the young, novel-reading was regarded as morally dangerous, exerting harmful effects on readers. As a new form of media culture and print entertainment, the novel in early eighteenth-century Britain engendered the anti-novel discourse. Structured on the Christian pattern of disobedience, punishment, repentance, and deliverance, Robinson Crusoe, the novel itself, and the protagonist, Robinson Crusoe, are regenerated from a dis-example to an example, by which it not only subverts the condemnation of the effects of the novel on readers, but also recognizes and supports Christian values and the divine order. Crusoe’s transformation from dis-example to example overthrows the concerns imposed by the anti-novel discourse and bolsters power to religious authority.