Defoe and the ‘improvisatory’ sentence

Argues that Defoe's sentences (and his novels) are constructed by improvisation, and that in his writings form -- fictional form as well as syntactical form -- is almost always retrospective form. In this he goes against what might be called the 'Ciceronian' tradition in prose-writing, which attributes special value to the end of sentences,which function as a logical and rhetorical 'resolution' of all that has gone before. Defoe general outlook on life (his 'projecting' spirit, his Whiggism, his contempt for the past and tradition) may be seen as predisposing factors to his very different, 'improvisatory' notion of literary form, in which ends are not embryonically contained in beginnings. The subtle flavour of this improvisatory style is damaged when editors modernize Defoe's punctuation

Art · Linguistics · Sentence · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Samuel Beckett and Modernism · South African History and Culture · History · Philosophy

• The Style of Defoe’s Correspondence

  Marc Mierowsky•Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe•2023

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