Moll Flanders [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION I Robinson Crusoe has often been referred to as a romance, but Moll Flanders, which followed it by three years, is widely taught and written about as the first English novel. Few other works of fiction have been the subject of so much critical debate in recent years; most widely canvassed has been the question of Defoe's artistic control. Are the numerous contradictions in the words, actions, and total character of Moll Flanders the result of deliberate authorial strategy, of unresolved ambivalences in Defoe's conception of his heroine, or perhaps merely of hasty and unrevised composition by a wonderfully gifted yet somewhat primitive writer? Is Moll the object of Defoe's sustained conscious irony, or do we as readers perceive ironies which Defoe did not intend, and in which his own values are gravely implicated.? Criticism preoccupied with the problem of irony has called attention to many inconsistencies that might otherwise have gone unnoticed in Moll's narrative; considerable research into the moral, economic, social, and literary background of Moll Flanders has been brought to bear on the discussion, and although such information has not settled the debate over irony,^ it too has fostered a sense of the book's complexities. At the same time, an unstated premise of much of the debate has been that Defoe's artistry is vindicated if inconsistencies can be shown to have been deliberate. This view is not confined to critics of Defoe— works of all kinds are prized today for containing paradoxes, untrustworthy personae, and other forms of calculated ambiguity—nor is it groundless; but it may shed less light 1 The main contentions are summarized in Watt, 'Recent Critical Fortunes of M.F.'; for fuller references to works cited in this Introduction see Bibliography, infra.