institution of the English novel: Defoe's contribution, The

I have tried to follow the wandering adventures of the Defoe text, more complicated but not unlike the wanderings of Yorick's sermon in Tristram Shandy. I think it is safe to assume these restless wanderings, not unlike those of Robinson himself, have not yet returned home and perhaps never can. Such a story might suggest that the Defoe text has always been at the mercy of changing protocols of reading, each of which from its own perspective has tried to fathom the source of its peculiar power-power it would be erroneous to regard as purely or even mostly literary-and failed. Just as those lives that Defoe described take place on the margins of society, their narratives lie on the margins or outside the limits of the now institutional Defoe novels, those that come to mind as the ones that set an agenda for a genre. As for these other narratives, the question remains whether they are merely not yet novels. We must also conclude that the problem of their institutional status is only intensified by the fact that they only may be written by Defoe, and so their generic status cannot be determined by any mere discovery of an author's name. This is a question about the very nature of what we call the literary. The institution of the novel takes place about the same time as the institution of what is always called literature, in the modern sense of the term. Thus it might be fair to imagine both finding neither shelter, nor closure, nor anything more than partial autonomy within the grounds or walls of their institutions. And if the novel must constantly renew its search for novelty, its very novelness, in what is by definition outside or beyond it, in its other, so would literature, driven by a similar cultural logic, have to follow in that pursuit.

This esy draws on the resarch and argument of the last chapter of Horner Brown's book, Instiiaions of the Ells 1n1, forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

And sontimes with the collabor tico of Scottish Enlightenment intellectuals who were also apparently the first to invent' English literature for academic purposes See Crawford.

3 I am referring of course to post-colonial criticism Minimally, In regard to Defoe one must mention Hulme's chapter on Rain Crusoe; Green and Rogers are also still valuable starting points for this subject. 4 On Mm Barbauld, see CE Moore. Much of the detail about the editions that follows is from the second volume of Sadletr.

The best account of the publication and problema of Balm:nymi's Nove's Library I know of is Millgate e.

6 This was created In order to support the constitutional settlements following the 1688-89 Glorious Revolution

An important account of the scholarship concerning the development of the Defoe canon or oeuvre is in Furbank and Owens. They develop some of the questions I raise here, but still inconclusively. Rogers has interesting short accounts of the publishing and the biographical/critical tradition of the Defoe canon in both Thc Gtied fim Wgc and in his book on Robinson Crusom. Much of the information that follows comes from these sources.