Michael B. Prince’s study The Shortest Way with Defoe is an extraordinary accomplishment. Depicting Defoe as an archironist, Prince’s study measures Defoe’s ironies with precision, designedly treading a trail of speculations that might well have delighted Defoe himself. It is, in fact, the sort of work Defoe might even have written had he turned his considerable talents to the field of literary criticism and taken himself as his subject. The result is one of the most intelligent, provocative, deeply researched, and—a word one rarely feels tempted to use in the context of reviewing—pleasurable works of literary and historical analysis that I have had the good fortune to read in recent years.
Erudite without being weighty, highly readable and remarkably clear on even the most tangled of topics, The Shortest Way with Defoe is innovative in its reframing of an author for whom oceans of criticism already exist. Prince’s study rests...