This book focuses on the pervasive concern with narrativity and self-construction that marks Defoe's first-person fictional narratives. Defoe's fictions focus obsessively and elaborately on the act of storytelling--not only in his creation of idiosyncratic voices preoccupied with the telling (and often the concealing) of their own life stories but also in his narrators' repeated adversion to other, untold stories that compete for attention with their own. Defoe's narratives raise profound questions about selfhood and agency (as well as demonstrate competing attitudes about narration) in his...