THE READER IN THE TEXT

The Compleat English Tradesman suggests that fiction cannot be identified a priori – potential fiction is a risk of marketplace texts. The prefaces of Crusoe, Moll, and Roxana, flaunting an affiliation with print- (and hence market-) culture, reinscribe the generic elusiveness of commercial texts, deferring interrogation of the protagonist/authors. “Promiscuously conversing” with other texts in the market, Defoe's narrative fictions construct “fiction” as a generalized perceptual crux, neither confined nor mediated by a genre that localizes and avows fictionality. As such, Defoe's fictions resist formalist, exclusively aesthetic analyses that assign them to a genre: the novel. They emerge into focus only contingently, as nodes in a textual/contextual matrix that elaborates marketplace “fiction.” Thus it is anachronistic to suggest that because the final episodes of Roxana describe a plotted trajectory, anticipating narrative closure, the text displays impulses adumbrating the “novel.” Such dehistoricizing of form casts Roxana as an autonomous aesthetic object, remote from tropes in the market that (through seductive “appearance”) suspend (dis)closure and enable generic evasion. In this chapter I argue that Roxana, which formalists cite as inviting readers to accept it as fiction, dramatizes the opposite motion: a terror that fiction may be exposed. Roxana explores the limits of authorial capacity to sustain generic uncertainty, hence evade accountability.

In this heuristic mode, Roxana (or rather Roxana) is an ironic reprise of Lady Credit, the tour de force narrative phenomenon who defies (dis) closure. As the primary projection of Defoe's discourse of generic evasion, Lady Credit is poised to inhabit Defoe's most ambitious generic evasions, the narrative fictions that concatenate with rise and fall in the speculative market.