ABSTRACT
The most famous fictional Defoe features in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), in which he conjures Robinson Crusoe out of a memoir by a “true” castaway. Harrumphing across the country alongside the modern-day narrator of Stuart Campbell’s Daniel Defoe’s Railway Journey (2017), a surreal iteration quite literally leaps out of the pages of a Penguin Classics edition of his real-life counterpart’s travel writing. Setting aside a long tradition of neo-Georgian novels in which Defoe cameos as a seventeenth-century spy, a Defoe-as-character only for all intents and purposes, this chapter attends to two complex cases in the genre of author fictions: Coetzee’s Foe and Campbell’s Defoe.
