Daniel Defoe

The reevaluation of canonical texts by applying poststructural theories has made the rewriting of any period possible through rewriting the subjectivity of its authors. As emblems of conflicting discourses of conscious and unconscious drives, literary texts can reveal the decentred nature of writing subjects’ selfhood. Using Lacanian and Kristevan insights on subjectivity construction this book analyzes Daniel Defoe’s novels to rewrites the subjectivity of an 18th c. spokesman of patriarchal ideologies as a degendered androgyn. Focusing on the inconsistency in Defoe’s voice in his novels the book traces his reversed psychological journey from masculinity in the Lacanian Symbolic, featured in his early novels, towards the realm of feminine in the Lacanian Imaginary and Kristevan Semiotic in his later pieces and eventually to the androgynous state of the Real in his last work. Defoe’s entire novelistic output is grouped chronologically into three categories to correspond Lacan’s tripartite model to present a unified picture of Defoe’s gradual quest towards the deconstruction of subjectification and his deterioration of gender boundaries by rewriting his Self while writing his texts.