...Here is a passage: Thus from a Mixture of all Kinds began, That Het'rogeneous Thing, An Englishman: The Wonder which remains is at our Pride, To value...contradiction, In Speech an Irony, in Fact a Fiction. (42-42) 12See Backscheider's discussion of the Shortest Way episode pp. 84-135. That Defoe's intention...

...Defoe, writing in 1701, to illustrate the problems the English faced in trying to define themselves: 'A true-born Englishman's a contradiction In speech an irony, in fact a fiction, A metaphor intended to express A man akin to all the universe.' 6 With the outbreak of the First World...

...itself is nothing if not hybrid. As Daniel Defoe observed in 1701, in The True-Born Englishman: a satyr, 'A true-born Englishman's a contradiction: / In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.' Like any other national identity, Englishness has always implied a range of disparate cultural elements...

...From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came, With neither name, nor nation, speech nor fame . . . A true-born Englishman's a contradiction, In speech an irony, in fact a fiction. (279-80, 285-86, 317-18) The animal who will become for the nineteenth century a stabilizing, embodied...

...hodgepodge ere the 17th century and had been a refuge for degenerates for centuries, as Defoe remarks*: For Englishmen to boast of generation Cancels their...contradiction In speech an irony, in fact a fiction. # * * And here begins the ancient pedigree, t That so exalts our poor nobility. * True-born Enelishman....