SOURCE: "Daniel Defoe: The Father of the Soap Opera," in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. VIII, No. 4, Spring, 1975, pp. 767-74.

In the following essay, Aldrich identifies similarities of plot, character, theme, and language between the modern television serial drama and the novels of Daniel Defoe.

Should one mention Defoe and soap opera in the same breath, theoretically he is dealing with two extremes—literature and non-literature written for the mass media—but actually he is not. In his own day, Defoe wrote for the mass media and his five novels, mined from the enormous paper mountain his great productivity piled up, are now called literature because they show, in retrospect, qualities that became identified as artistic during the novel's development into an art form. Whether soap opera, in retrospect, will show qualities of a yet-to-benamed art form is impossible to predict, but we can make some relationships between...