In contemporary criticism Robinson Crusoe is automatically referred to as a novel. Leo Braudy, for example, while acknowledging that Defoe used a first-person narrator in both his nonfiction and his fiction, distinguishes between the former type that focuses on some “public person” and the latter type that features a “private impersonation” and classifies the latter, including Crusoe, as novels. Similarly, in her life of Defoe, Paula Backscheider recognizes that Defoe defended Crusoe as “Allegorick History” and that “some readers have always found the book autobiographical,” but she nevertheless refers to the text in an untroubled way as a novel. And Michael Seidel has recently asserted:

No matter how much one may agree with Seidel that Defoe's career was the locus of a great transformation that eventuated in the discourse of the novel in English, there is still no question that Defoe's narratives are strikingly different from the works of later novelists like Richardson and Fielding. Those later texts were presented to readers as a “new species of writing” or a new form of fiction, whereas Defoe sought to ensure that his most famous narratives would be read not as fiction but as history.

To be sure, critics have often read the “telling overprotestationfs]” of historicity that one finds in a number of these texts (Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Memoirs of a Cavalier, Roxana) as tropological assertions that the works in question were in fact novels.