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Topographies of the Imagination: New Approaches to Daniel Defoe ed. by Katherine Ellison, Kit Kincade, and Holly Faith Nelson (review)

Literary scholars have often been challenged in the past fifty years to reorient themselves in their chosen fields of study by many assaults on their pedagogical and critical principles. Typical assaults have featured charges upon the validity of literary history and biographical criticism. Nor has the rise of sociology with its systematization of material facts proved a firm defender of the liberal arts. Claims proposing revolutionary epistemic and paradigmatic shifts have depreciated the intellectual coin of the Enlightenment and aggravated the “culture wars.” The growth of the “administrative university” may have effected a major decline in the humanities, one result being that one fifth of undergraduate degrees awarded today in North America are in business studies, another that the place in the curriculum of pre-1800 texts is increasingly hard to locate. What better author, given his voluminous writings in and across many genres, could one select through whom to respond creatively to the issues outlined above? The editors of this volume are to be congratulated for achieving several major tasks: they serve the Defoe Society’s future well by providing