Daniel Defoe and the Aesthetics of Discovery

This essay seeks to re-inscribe Defoe’s non-fictional writings on the nurturing nexus between travel and knowledge within a wider cultural framework, in which the interaction of ideological assumptions and narrative insights help to outline what could be properly termed as vibrant, if politically charged, “aesthetics” of discovery. Rescuing Defoe’s A General History of Discoveries and Improvements (1724) from its current diminutive status as just one more unimaginative tract in the wake of late seventeenth-century “natural histories of facts”, this paper argues that, far from being such a derivative kind of work, the General History conflates its apparent baconian mould with the competing influence of Sir Walter Raleigh’s historiography, from which it draws its greater emphasis on myth and moral exempla as well as its more pressingly imperial stance.