John Richetti is A. M. Rosenthal Professor (Emeritus) at the University of Pennsylvania. His published books include: Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700–1739 (1969); Defoe's Narratives: Situations and Structures (1975); The Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography (2005); and A History of British Eighteenth-Century Literature (2017). He has also edited two Cambridge Companions, The Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Cambridge, 1996) and Daniel Defoe (Cambridge, 2009), as well as The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 (Cambridge, 2005).