Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the neo-Georgian fiction. It examines how Enlightenment philosophies of personal identity and the Georgian obsession with masquerading and theatre can elucidate modern debates about performativity and the self. The book then focuses on two appearances of Daniel Defoe as fictional character, in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe and Stuart Campbell’s Daniel Defoe’s Railway Journey, to ponder more general questions about discursive power and narrative authority in the context of the mechanisms of the Georgian literary marketplace and the evolving notion of authorship. It also focuses on Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger and argues that the eighteenth-century slave trade realities are invoked in the novel to address wider concerns about the coercive and disciplining dimensions of economic systems. The book details Michael Irwin’s 2013 The Skull and the Nightingale.