Episodic or Novelistic?: Law in the Atlantic and the Form of Daniel Defoe’s Colonel Jack

Abstract

nineteenth-and twentieth-century conceptions of the novel have been retrospectively projected onto earlier, incipient fields of fictional writing.1 In English, this projection has been especially apparent in studies of early eighteenth-century literature where the term "novel" has long been used with little concern over historical accuracy. Using the example of Daniel Defoe's Roxana (first published in 1724), recent studies by Nicholas Seager and Mary Poovey have shown such processes of reinterpretation were already at work by 1740 when the model of domestic fiction absorbed earlier works and the continuum between fact and fiction began to break apart.2 These realizations are crucial, but, as I