The World Is Not Enough: Lists as Encounters with the "Real" in the Eighteenth Century Novel
The list plays a key role in the development of the eighteenth century novel as a self consciously innovative form. In this essay I examine the function of enumerations in two key texts, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, where they not only produce a heightened sense of credibility and plausibility, but also import contemporary systems of thought and stage interiority and negotiate the status of the novel in relation to other types of text. The form of the list, I argue, is to be seen as an instrument in a larger project of novelistic self assertion.