ASECS at 50: Interview with Maximillian Novak

• Published in: Eighteenth-century studies 2020-03, Vol.53 (3), p.379-385
• Main Authors: Mitsein, Rebekah, Novak, Maximillian
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 18th century; 19th century; Biographies; College students; Congreve, William (1670-1729); Conversation; Defoe, Daniel (1660-1731); Essays; Fiction; Graduate studies; Novels; Politics; Structuralism; Writers
• ISSN: 0013-2586; 1086-315X; 1086-315X
• DOI: 10.1353/ecs.2020.0037

Reflecting on his early days of graduate school at UCLA in an article for the launch issue of Digital Defoe in 2009, Maximillian Novak observed that he was "far from your single minded, professionally oriented graduate student," unsure what field to specialize in and absorbed by a range of writers and critical questions.1 "My favorite author was Swift," he wrote, but it was the topic of "Defoe and economics" that ultimately grabbed Novak's attention. Novak entered that conversation with a dissertation that became his first book, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Univ. of California Press, 1962), in which he pushed back against the tendency to read Defoe as a champion of economic individualism, instead presenting Defoe's fiction through the lens of his mercantilist sensibilities and arguing for the moral and social complexity of Defoe's characters. "2 Across a six-decade career, Novak has done that and more, not only rendering Defoe's protean oeuvre more approachable and meaningful for subsequent scholars, but also making significant contributions to the study of the eighteenth-century novel by scrupulously situating it within the era's cultural, political, and economic networks. Rebekah Mitsein: You've been a part of ASECS for much of its history, first appearing on an ASECS program as an organizer in 1971, when UCLA hosted the society's 3rd annual meeting, and serving on its executive board from 1978–1981.