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Chapter 7 - Surprised by Providence: Robinson Crusoe as Defoe’s Theory of Fiction

from Part III - Uses of Scripture for Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 March 2021

Kevin Seidel
Affiliation:
Eastern Mennonite University, Virginia
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Summary

Chapter 7 discusses the kind of rhetorical irony that gathered in debates about the Bible in the early 1700s and then shows how Defoe puts that irony to use in the Bible scenes scattered through his three-book Crusoe novel (1719–1721), from Crusoe’s initial experiments with the Bible and tobacco leaves that he finds in a chest of scavenged goods, to the same Bible, which he later hands to Will Atkins to appoint him governor of the island, to the parables that Crusoe tells after his final “Vision of the Angelick World.” Those Bible scenes and parables help us track Defoe as he develops his theory of fiction, which he describes as narrative that creates the conditions for providence to make surprising, accidental connections between his text and its readers.

Type
Chapter
Information
Rethinking the Secular Origins of the Novel
The Bible in English Fiction 1678–1767
, pp. 179 - 201
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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