In Defoe's Footprints, essays by prominent scholars of eighteenth-century literature salute Maximillian E. Novak's influence upon the study of Daniel Defoe. Best known today as the author of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe was a prolific writer in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries who wrote novels, essays, pamphlets, and poems. Widely extending Novak's perspectives, this volume explores Defoe's place in the English novel and in literary developments of mimesis, realism, and popular mythology.

The contributors locate Defoe in new ways within the complex symbolism and discourse of a turbulent world of burgeoning capitalism, Protestantism, imperialism, and economic speculation. With attention to Defoe's neglected writings as well as to his important works, this volume uncovers his distance from and influence on modern literature, paying tribute to Maximillian E. Novak by presenting new ideas about, and new readings of, Daniel Defoe.

Robert M. Maniquis is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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Carl Fisher is a professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative World Literature and Classics at California State University, Long Beach.

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Defoe's Footprints brings together a clutch of penetrating, searching, and altogether fascinating essays on various aspects of Defoe's life and work. Each exhibits a triangulation unique to this sort of volume... The result is consistently riveting.

Prof. Jonathan Kramnick, <em>Studies in English Literature 1500-1900</em>, vol 50:03:2010