Citation

Youssef S. Law Lit. 2015; 27(1): 75-98.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, University of California Press)

DOI

10.1080/1535685X.2014.964971

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This essay is a purposive rereading of Robinson Crusoe (1719) in light of the account given in The Political History of the Devil (1726) of the superiority of "historically ordered narrative" to epic poetry. Completed in the wake of the Salters' Hall controversy in which the ongoing conflict between Trinitarian orthodoxy and proponents of the Arian Heresy loomed large and provoked further denominational schism, Robinson Crusoe was conceived as a rebuttal to Paradise Lost as well as, more broadly, the narrative techniques underlying epic poetry. In representing the tutelage in consequential logic that Friday undergoes, Defoe challenges the liberties that Milton takes with continuity and chronology in his poem. In The Political History of the Devil, Defoe later argues that in its discontinuity and use of startling, absorbing imagery, poetry promotes moral hazard and covertly imports theological her-esies into its scriptural glosses. Reading Robinson Crusoe against Paradise Lost demonstrates that Defoe's musings on genre are rooted in an express fasci-nation with the new actuarial sciences and emerging categories of risk and influence, and that it is out of this fateful encounter between insurance and theology that the novel emerges. By transforming the theological notion of sin into an economic theory of risk, Defoe used actuarial logic to rationalize Christianity as a teaching based on normative principles of narrative causality for its students to apply in the management of the contingencies of everyday life. © 2015 by The Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. All rights reserved.

Language: en

Keywords

suicide; depression; risk; insurance; Arian heresy; continuity; Defoe; influence; mass casualties; Milton; moral hazard; narrative absorption; perverse incentive; realist novel; Salters’ Hall