Abstract
As early practices of literary production, Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders and Roxana integrated peeping with moralizing, exemplifying the transformation from the linear logic of author-work-reader to the bidirectional logic of author-work and authorreader. Through textual analyses of Moll Flanders and Roxana, this article argues that forerunners of eighteenth-century English novelists represented by Defoe were engaged in literary production in the spirit of exposing the interactive construction of personal subjectivity and social publicness. With peeping and moralizing as creative forms, their works laid foundation for the theory of literary production gradually developed by Karl Marx, Pierre Macherey, and Terry Eagleton, which provided evidence for Marx's literary concept of dialectical materialism as well.
First Page
128
Last Page
136
Recommended Citation
Hu, Zhenming. 2020. "Peeping and Moralizing: Daniel Defoe's Practices of Literary Production." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 40, (4): pp.128-136. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol40/iss4/14
