Abstract
In a lecture delivered on Defoe in Italian at the Universita Popolare Triestina in 1912, James Joyce argued that ‘the first English author to write without imitating or adapting foreign works, to create without literary models and to infuse into the creatures of his pen a truly national spirit … is Daniel Defoe’.1 It is a unique and rather extravagant claim to be made in literary history,2 and perhaps it is surprising that it was made by a writer like Joyce whose style and method, while utterly original, show a myriad of influences and debts which, not always consciously, found their way into his works. What I should like to argue in this paper is that there were, indeed, ‘foreign works’ that could have been used in the writing of Robinson Crusoe.
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Notes
Italian, J. Prescott, Buffalo Studies (1964), p. 7.
J. R. Moore, Daniel Defoe: Citizen of the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
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G. Sher burn (ed.), The Correspondence of Alexander Pope 1719–1728, vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956) p. 13.
Karl D. Biilbring (ed.), The Compleat English Gentleman (London, 1890) pp. 218–19.
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S. Khadra-Jayyusi (ed.), The Legacy of Muslim Spain (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992) p. 832.
Robert W. Ayers, ‘Robinson Crusoe: “Allusive Allegorick History”’, PMLA, 82. 5 (October, 1967) footnote 28, 404–5.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Miscellanies, Aesthetic and Literary: to which is added The Theory of Life, collected and arranged T. Ashe (London: George Bell and Sons, 1885), p. 160.
J. R. Moore, ‘Mandeville and Defoe’, in Mandeville Studies: New Explorations in the Art and Thought of Dr. Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733), Irwin Primer (ed.), (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975) pp. 119–25.
Sinbad’s Voyages, The Book of the Thousand Nights and A Night, vol. VI (London, 1885–8)
James Joyce, ‘Daniel Defoe’, Buffalo Studies (1964), pp. 24–5.
W. P. Trent, Cambridge History of English Literature, IX, 1913.
Margaret Drabble, Oxford Companion to English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) p. 263.
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Attar, S. (1996). Serving God or Mammon? Echoes from Hayy Ibn Yaqzan and Sinbad the Sailor in Robinson Crusoe. In: Spaas, L., Stimpson, B. (eds) Robinson Crusoe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13677-3_6
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