Attribution and the Defoe Canon
Benjamin F. Pauley · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023
Abstract The question of what Daniel Defoe wrote was vexed in his own day and has continued so ever since. While it seems clear that Defoe wrote more than the approximately sixty works whose authorship he affirmed, it seems equally clear that he did not write all of the hundreds of works that have been attributed to him over the years. This chapter surveys the debates surrounding the attribution of works to Defoe (with particular attention to the critique of the Defoe canon by Furbank and Owens and subsequent responses to their work), and it weighs the equivocal promise of computer-assisted stylometric analysis for author attribution. Many of the uncertainties surrounding the Defoe canon simply reflect the circumstances of printed publication in Defoe’s day. Thinking about the Defoe canon demands, to an unusual degree, engagement with the broader universe of early eighteenth-century print, in which certainty about authorship is necessarily elusive.