Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book considers how Daniel Defoe’s deployment of authorial ‘personae’ embodies the burgeoning possibilities of authorial identity in early modern print culture. It examines notions of ‘genre’ when applied to early modern writing and offers a sustained literary analysis of Defoe’s creation of authorial personae and their concomitant stance of informed moral authority. The book offers the means to reread Defoe’s earlier writing via their authorial personae and rhetorical strategies which belie their origins in the Protestant nonconformist literary tradition. It demonstrates what Defoe shares with contemporary ministers while he simultaneously disengages his authorial personae from associations with either nonconformity or ministerial discourse. The book suggests a number of reasons why Defoe’s engagement with contemporary non-conformity and ministerial function in general is implicated in his adoption of a remote and deserted island setting in Robinson Crusoe.