Read the full review Helen Gardner points out in The Business of Criticism (1959) that no work of art is autonomous but has "an historical relation to the author's other works".
The English sailor Robert Knox described walking into the island's Tamil country in the publication An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon, annotating some kingdoms within it on a map in 1681.
The English sailor Robert Knox described walking into the island's Tamil country in the publication An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon, referencing some aspects of their royal, rural and economic life and annotating some kingdoms within it on a map in 1681 CE.
There was also a copy of a page from a book called "A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs from September, 1678 to April, 1714," by Narcissus Luttrell, who, like Samuel Pepys, kept a record of the daily events in Parliament.
For example, what makes a Euro coin worth one Euro is that, in addition to its intrinsic physical properties, it bears an extrinsic historical relation to some European governmental agency.
Frank admits that Knox's Historical Relation is a drearily prolix ramble, but she seems to admire it more than anything Defoe wrote: she regards the great novelist as a hack with overdue bills to pay, who "churned out" an "astonishing surfeit of work" while simultaneously breeding cattle, raising corn, tanning leather, importing anchovies and selling metal buttons.
Selkirk receives only a couple of grudging mentions in Frank's book, since she prefers to believe that Defoe, "a congenital plagiarist", was cannibalising Knox's Historical Relation of Ceylon.
Edward Baring (2011) exhumes the historical relation between Derrida and existentialism and finds a kind of "'Christian' existentialism" in Derrida's work prior to 1952, traces of which are discernible in his later thinking.
Knox's "Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon" — on its 1681 publication a best seller that enabled its author to begin re-establishing himself in London — has been previously cited as one of many possible sources for Defoe's novel.
It covered works that bore no aesthetic or historical relation to each other.
