John Fowles pays in his latest novel, A Maggot, an intertextual homage
to eighteenth-century realism and, more particularly, to one of its
founders and supreme masters, Daniel Defoe. This essay tackles the
meaning of realism that postmodern writing questions and thematizes
parodically, bringing back to the surface one of the tenets of the realist
philosophy: that realism is not reality, but a textual construct that, ever
since its beginnings, proved to be ontologically hesitant. Thus, this paper
will examine the different discourses that attach A Maggot to eighteenth-
century realism and epistemology, disclosing simultaneously their
alliance with the aesthetics of postmodern thought and expression.
