An approach to character development in Defoe's narrative prose

Abstract

[From article]: The critical approach to character in Defoe’s narrative prose has been mainly circuitous. By emphasizing genres as external patterns that inform his conception of the individual, interpretation of central character is often sacrificed to analysis of the form assumed to beget the character.[...] And as these forms are significations of random bourgeois interests, the characters within them, the criticism suggests, are all representative of resourceful middle-class Englishmen. Yet summarily to dismiss the characters as middle class is at best middling criticism, however undeniably valuable that criticism may otherwise be in its manifold discoveries.[...] I do not suggest, of course, that an internal approach is the only solution, but conceding the question of genre to the critics to say that Defoe uses features of many forms leaves still the problem of character as character. Looking at that problem, however, in terms of events, actions with which the characters are intimately involved can allow more fruitful answers.