SOURCE: "Theories of Fiction in Early English Novels," in Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel, Columbia University Press, 1983, p. 102-22.

In the following essay, Davis argues that early novelists put forth concepts of fiction that implicitly sought to disarm a public that paradoxically both demanded fiction and looked down upon "untruthful" tales.

If Robinson Crusoe wound up on an island, historians of the novel were partially responsible for putting him there. Until fairly recently, it had generally been the practice of literary histories of the novel, to regard Defoe as the first English novelist, and most treatments of the novel tend to move quickly from Don Quixote to English Robinson Crusoe, from one gaunt touchstone to the other, with the assumption that this was the most direct way along the road to the great tradition. Crusoe, however, was far from being an isolated novel in a...