Literature Program and Dean of the College Present
The Novel Before the Nation-State: Robinson Crusoe and Early Global Fiction
Thursday, February 28, 2019
Olin Humanities, Room 102
5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Stephanie DeGooyer, Assistant Professor of English, Williamette University
Between 1685 and 1710, over 60,000 migrants from France and Germany fled to England in search of settlement. This wave of migration produced some of the first legislation to grant national rights to foreigners in England. I argue that this migration was also crucial to the development of the novel. Early novelists were attentive to the rights of foreigners and developed new narrative techniques and generic conventions to offer more expansive—what I call “paranational”—conceptions of national community.In this talk I tell a new and more transnational story about the novel as a genre, a story that makes the 18th century pivotal for debates about global fiction. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) is an important example because it has long been thought to be quintessentially English; to exemplify both the English novel and the English subject. Yet this reading contains crucial oversights. Defoe uses Crusoe’s uncertain status as the son of a foreigner to explore intercolonial migration among the English, Spanish, and Portuguese empires, thereby rendering England peripheral to larger and more global investments. Defoe, I argue, developed the novel as a way to explore structures of mobility and capitalism in an emergent global age.
For more information, call 845-758-7203, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102