The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates. Written by Himself.
Robinson Crusoe[a] (/ˈkruːsoʊ/KROO-soh) is an English adventure novel byDaniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719. It is often credited as marking the beginning of realistic fiction as a literary genre, and has been described as the firstnovel, or at least the firstEnglish novel – although these labels are disputed.[2][3]
Written with a combination ofepistolary,confessional, anddidactic forms, the book follows the title character (born Robinson Kreutznaer) after he iscast away and spends 28 years on a remote tropicaldesert island near the coasts ofVenezuela andTrinidad, encounteringcannibals, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. The story has been thought to be based on the life ofAlexander Selkirk,[4] a Scottish castaway who lived for four years on a Pacific island called "Más a Tierra" (now part ofChile) which was renamedRobinson Crusoe Island in 1966.[5]: 23–24 [6]Pedro Serrano is another real-life castaway whose story might have inspired the novel.[7][8]
The first edition credited the work's protagonist Robinson Crusoe as its author, leading many readers to believe he was a real person and that the book was a non-fictiontravelogue.[9] Despite its simple narrative style,Robinson Crusoe was well received in the literary world.
Before the end of 1719, the book had already run through four editions, and it has gone on to become one of the most widely published books in history, spawning so many imitations, not only in literature but also in film, television, and radio, that its name is used to define a genre, theRobinsonade.[10]
Pictorial map of Crusoe's island, the "Island of Despair", showing incidents from the book
Robinson Crusoe (the family name coming from the German name "Kreutznaer") sets sail fromKingston upon Hull,England, on a sea voyage in August 1651, against the wishes of his parents, who wanted him to pursue a career in law. After a tumultuous journey where his ship is wrecked in a storm, his desire for the sea remains so strong that he sets out to sea again. This journey, too, ends in disaster, as the ship is taken over bySalépirates (theSalé Rovers) and Crusoe is enslaved by aMoor. Two years later, he escapes in a boat with a boy named Xury; a captain of a Portuguese ship off the west coast of Africa rescues him. The ship isen route toBrazil. Crusoe sells Xury to the captain. With the captain's help, Crusoe procures aplantation in Brazil.
Years later, Crusoe joins an expedition topurchase slaves from Africa but the ship gets blown off course in a storm about forty miles out to sea and runs aground on the sandbar of an island off theVenezuelan coast (which he calls theIsland of Despair) near the mouth of theOrinoco River on 30 September 1659.[1]: Chapter 23 The crew lowers thejolly boat, but it gets swamped by a tidal wave, drowning the crew, but leaving Crusoe the sole human survivor. He observes the latitude as 9 degrees and 22 minutes north. He sees penguins andseals on this island. Aside from Crusoe, the captain's dog and two cats survive the shipwreck. Overcoming his despair, he fetches arms, tools and other supplies from the ship before the next storm breaks it apart. He builds a fenced-in habitat near a cave which he excavates. By making marks in a wooden cross, he creates a calendar post to keep track of his time on the island. Over the years, by using tools salvaged from the ship, and some which he makes himself, he hunts animals, grows barley and rice, dries grapes to make raisins, learns to make pottery and traps and raises goats. He also adopts a small parrot. He reads theBible and becomes religious, thanking God for his fate in which nothing is missing but human society. He also builds two boats: a large dugout canoe that he intends to use to sail to the mainland, but ends up being too large and too far from water to launch, and a smaller boat that he uses to explore the coast of the island.
More years pass and Crusoe discoverscannibals, who occasionally visit the island to kill and eat prisoners. Alarmed at this, he conserves the ammunition he'd used for hunting (running low at that point) for defence and fortifies his home in case the cannibals discover his presence on the island. He plans to kill them for committing an abomination, but later realizes he has no right to do so, as the cannibals do not knowingly commit a crime. One day, Crusoe finds that a Spanishgalleon has run aground on the island during a storm, but his hopes for rescue are dashed when he discovers that the crew abandoned the ship. Nevertheless, the abandoned galleon's untouched supplies of food and ammunition, along with the ship's dog, add to Crusoe's reserves. Every night, he dreams of obtaining one or two servants by freeing some prisoners; during the cannibals' next visit to the island, when a prisoner escapes, Crusoe helps him, naming his new companion "Friday" after the day of the week he appeared. Crusoe teaches Friday the English language andconverts him to Christianity.
Crusoe soon learns from Friday that the crew from the shipwrecked galleon he'd found had escaped to the mainland and are now living with Friday's tribe. Seeing renewed hope for rescue and with Friday's help, Crusoe builds another, but smaller, dugout canoe for a renewed plan to sail to the mainland. After more cannibals arrive to partake in a feast, Crusoe and Friday kill most of them and save two prisoners. One is Friday's father and the other is a Spaniard, who informs Crusoe about the other Spaniards shipwrecked on the mainland. A plan is devised wherein the Spaniard would return to the mainland with Friday's father and bring back the others, build a ship, and sail to a Spanish port.
Before the Spaniards return, an English ship appears; the sailors have staged a mutiny against their captain and intend to leave him and those still loyal to him on the island. Crusoe and the ship's captain strike a deal in which Crusoe helps the captain and the loyal sailors retake the ship. With their ringleader executed by the captain, the mutineers take up Crusoe's offer to remain on the island rather than being returned to England as prisoners to be hanged. Before embarking for England, Crusoe shows the mutineers how he survived on the island and states that the Spaniards will be coming.
The route taken by Robinson Crusoe over the Pyrenees mountains in chapters 19 and 20 of Defoe's novel, as envisaged byJoseph Ribas [fr]
Crusoe leaves the island on 19 December 1686 and arrives in England on 11 June 1687. He learns that his family believed him dead; as a result, he was left nothing in his father's will. Crusoe departs for Lisbon to reclaim the profits of his estate in Brazil, which has granted him much wealth. In conclusion, he transports his wealth overland to England from Portugal to avoid travelling by sea. Friday accompanies him and,en route, they endure one last adventure together as they fight off famished wolves while crossing thePyrenees.[11]
Robinson Crusoe: The narrator of the novel, who gets shipwrecked.
Friday: A native Caribbean whom Crusoe saves from cannibalism, and subsequently names "Friday". He becomes a servant and friend to Crusoe.
Xury: Servant to Crusoe after they escape slavery from the Captain of the Rover together. He is later given to the Portuguese Sea Captain as an indentured servant.
The Widow: Friend to Crusoe who looks over his assets while he is away.
Portuguese Sea Captain: Rescues Crusoe after he escapes from slavery. Later helps him with his money and plantation.
The Spaniard: A man rescued by Crusoe and Friday from the cannibals who later helps them escape the island.
Friday's father: rescued by Crusoe and Friday at the same time as the Spaniard.
Robinson Crusoe's father: A merchant named Kreutznaer.
Captain of the Rover: Moorish pirate of Sallee who captures and enslaves Crusoe.
Traitorous crew members: members of a mutinied ship who appear towards the end of novel
The Savages: Cannibals that come to Crusoe's Island and who represent a threat to Crusoe's religious and moral convictions as well as his own safety.
There were many stories of real-life castaways in Defoe's time. Most famously, Defoe's suspected inspiration forRobinson Crusoe is thought to be Scottish sailorAlexander Selkirk, who spent four years on the uninhabited island ofMás a Tierra (renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966)[5]: 23–24 in theJuan Fernández Islands off the Chilean coast. Selkirk was rescued in 1709 byWoodes Rogers during a British expedition that led to the publication of Selkirk's adventures in bothA Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World andA Cruising Voyage Around the World in 1712. According toTim Severin, "Daniel Defoe, a secretive man, neither confirmed nor denied that Selkirk was the model for the hero of his book. Apparently written in six months or less,Robinson Crusoe was a publishing phenomenon."[12]
According toAndrew Lambert, author ofCrusoe's Island, it is a "false premise" to suppose that Defoe's novel was inspired by the experiences of a single person such as Selkirk, because the story is "a complex compound of all the other buccaneer survival stories."[13] However,Robinson Crusoe is far from a copy of Rogers' account: Becky Little argues three events that distinguish the two stories:
Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked while Selkirk decided to leave his ship, thus marooning himself;
The island that Crusoe was shipwrecked on had already been inhabited, unlike the solitary nature of Selkirk's adventures.
The last and most crucial difference between the two stories is that Selkirk was a privateer, looting and raiding coastal cities during the War of Spanish Succession.
"The economic and dynamic thrust of the book is completely alien to what the buccaneers are doing," Lambert says. "The buccaneers just want to capture some loot and come home and drink it all, and Crusoe isn't doing that at all. He's an economic imperialist: He's creating a world of trade and profit."[13]
Other possible sources for the narrative includeIbn Tufail'sHayy ibn Yaqdhan, and Spanish sixteenth-century sailorPedro Serrano. Ibn Tufail'sHayy ibn Yaqdhan is a twelfth-century philosophical novel also set on adesert island, and translated from Arabic into Latin and English a number of times in the half-century preceding Defoe's novel.[14][15][16][17]
Pedro Luis Serrano was a Spanish sailor who was marooned for seven or eight years on a small desert island after shipwrecking in the 1520s on a small island in the Caribbean off the coast of Nicaragua. He had no access to fresh water and lived off the blood and flesh of sea turtles and birds. He was quite a celebrity when he returned to Europe; before passing away, he recorded the hardships suffered in documents that show the endless anguish and suffering, the product of absolute abandonment to his fate, now held in theGeneral Archive of the Indies, inSeville.[citation needed] It is quite possible that Defoe heard his story in one of his visits to Spain before becoming a writer.[18]
Severin (2002)[5] unravels a much wider range of potential sources of inspiration, and concludes by identifying castaway surgeon Henry Pitman as the most likely:
An employee of theDuke of Monmouth, Pitman played a part in theMonmouth Rebellion. His short book about his desperate escape from a Caribbean penal colony, followed by his shipwrecking and subsequent desert island misadventures, was published byJohn Taylor ofPaternoster Row, London, whose sonWilliam Taylor later published Defoe's novel.
Severin argues that since Pitman appears to have lived in the lodgings above the father's publishing house and that Defoe himself was amercer in the area at the time, Defoe may have met Pitman in person and learned of his experiences first-hand, or possibly through submission of a draft.[5] Severin also discusses another publicized case of a marooned man named only asWill, of theMiskito people of Central America, who may have led to the depiction ofFriday.[21]
Secord (1963)[22] analyses the composition ofRobinson Crusoe and gives a list of possible sources of the story, rejecting the common theory that the story of Selkirk is Defoe's only source.
The book was published on 25 April 1719. Before the end of the year, this first volume had run through four editions.
By the end of the nineteenth century, no book in the history ofWestern literature had more editions, spin-offs, and translations (even into languages such asInuktitut,Coptic, andMaltese) thanRobinson Crusoe, with more than 700 such alternative versions, including children's versions with pictures and no text.[23]
The term "Robinsonade" was coined to describe the genre of stories similar toRobinson Crusoe.
Crusoe standing overFriday after he frees him from the cannibals, illustration byCarl Offterdinger
"He is the true prototype of the British colonist. ... The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit in Crusoe: the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity."
The novel has been subject to numerous analyses and interpretations since its publication. In a sense, Crusoe attempts to replicate his society on the island. This is achieved through the use of European technology, agriculture and even a rudimentary political hierarchy. Several times in the novel Crusoe refers to himself as the "king" of the island, while the captain describes him as the "governor" to the mutineers. At the very end of the novel the island is referred to as a "colony". The idealized master-servant relationship Defoe depicts between Crusoe and Friday can also be seen in terms ofcultural assimilation, with Crusoe representing the "enlightened" European while Friday is the "savage" who can only be redeemed from his cultural manners through assimilation into Crusoe's culture. Nonetheless, Defoe used Friday to criticize theSpanish colonization of the Americas.[25]
According to J.P. Hunter, Robinson is not a hero but aneveryman. He begins as a wanderer, aimless on a sea he does not understand, and ends as apilgrim, crossing a final mountain to enter thepromised land. The book tells the story of how Robinson becomes closer to God, not through listening tosermons in a church but through spending time alone amongstnature with only a Bible to read.
Conversely, cultural critic and literary scholar Michael Gurnow views the novel from aRousseauian perspective: The central character's movement from a primitive state to a more civilized one is interpreted as Crusoe's denial of humanity'sstate of nature.[26]
Robinson Crusoe is filled with religious aspects. Defoe was aPuritan moralist and normally worked in the guide tradition, writing books on how to be a good Puritan Christian, such asThe New Family Instructor (1727) andReligious Courtship (1722). WhileRobinson Crusoe is far more than a guide, it shares many of the themes and theological and moral points of view.
"Crusoe" may have been taken fromTimothy Cruso, a classmate of Defoe's who had written guide books, includingGod the Guide of Youth (1695), before dying at an early age – just eight years before Defoe wroteRobinson Crusoe. Cruso would have been remembered by contemporaries and the association with guide books is clear. It has even been speculated thatGod the Guide of Youth inspiredRobinson Crusoe because of a number of passages in that work that are closely tied to the novel.[27] A leitmotif of the novel is the Christian notion ofprovidence, penitence, and redemption.[28] Crusoe comes to repent of the follies of his youth. Defoe also foregrounds this theme by arranging highly significant events in the novel to occur on Crusoe's birthday. The denouement culminates not only in Crusoe's deliverance from the island, but his spiritual deliverance, his acceptance of Christian doctrine, and in his intuition of his own salvation.
When confronted with the cannibals, Crusoe wrestles with the problem ofcultural relativism. Despite his disgust, he feels unjustified in holding the natives morally responsible for a practice so deeply ingrained in their culture. Nevertheless, he retains his belief in an absolute standard of morality; he regards cannibalism as a "national crime" and forbids Friday from practising it.
Inclassical,neoclassical andAustrian economics, Crusoe is regularly used to illustrate the theory of production and choice in the absence of trade, money, and prices.[29] Crusoe must allocate effort between production and leisure and must choose between alternative production possibilities to meet his needs. The arrival of Friday is then used to illustrate the possibility of trade and the gains that result.
One day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man's naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen on the sand.
Defoe'sRobinson Crusoe, 1719
The work has been variously read as an allegory for the development of civilization; as a manifesto of economic individualism; and as an expression of European colonial desires. Significantly, it also shows the importance of repentance and illustrates the strength of Defoe's religious convictions. Critic M.E. Novak supports the connection between the religious and economic themes withinRobinson Crusoe, citing Defoe's religious ideology as the influence for his portrayal of Crusoe's economic ideals, and his support of the individual. Novak citesIan Watt's extensive research[30] which explores the impact that several Romantic Era novels had against economic individualism, and the reversal of those ideals that takes place withinRobinson Crusoe.[31]
In Tess Lewis's review, "The heroes we deserve", of Ian Watt's article, she furthers Watt's argument with a development on Defoe's intention as an author, "to use individualism to signify nonconformity in religion and the admirable qualities of self-reliance".[32]: 678 This further supports the belief that Defoe used aspects of spiritual autobiography to introduce the benefits of individualism to a not entirely convinced religious community.[32] J. Paul Hunter has written extensively on the subject ofRobinson Crusoe as apparent spiritual autobiography, tracing the influence of Defoe's Puritan ideology through Crusoe's narrative, and his acknowledgement of human imperfection in pursuit of meaningful spiritual engagements – the cycle of "repentance [and] deliverance".[33]
The book proved to be so popular that the names of the two main protagonists, Crusoe and Friday, have entered the language. DuringWorld War II, people who decided to stay and hide in theruins of the German-occupied city ofWarsaw for a period of three winter months, from October to January 1945, when they were rescued by theRed Army, were later calledRobinson Crusoes of Warsaw (Robinsonowie warszawscy).[35] Robinson Crusoe usually referred to his servant as "my man Friday", from which the term "Man Friday" (or "Girl Friday") originated.
Robinson Crusoe marked the beginning of realistic fiction as a literary genre.[36] Its success led to many imitators; and castaway novels, written by Ambrose Evans,Penelope Aubin, and others, became quite popular in Europe in the 18th and early 19th centuries.[37] Most of these have fallen into obscurity, but some became established, includingThe Swiss Family Robinson, which borrowed Crusoe's first name for its title.
Jonathan Swift'sGulliver's Travels, published seven years afterRobinson Crusoe, may be read as a systematic rebuttal of Defoe's optimistic account of human capability. InThe Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man,Warren Montag argues that Swift was concerned about refuting the notion that the individual precedes society, as Defoe's novel seems to suggest. InTreasure Island, authorRobert Louis Stevenson parodies[citation needed] Crusoe with the character ofBen Gunn, a friendly castaway who was marooned for many years, has a wild appearance, dresses entirely in goat skin, and constantly talks about providence.
Widely translated, the novel swiftly became influential beyond Britain. InJean-Jacques Rousseau's treatise on education,Emile, or on Education, the one book the protagonist is allowed to read before the age of twelve isRobinson Crusoe. Rousseau wants Emile to identify with Crusoe so he can rely upon himself for all of his needs. In Rousseau's view, Emile needs to imitate Crusoe's experience, allowing necessity to determine what is to be learned and accomplished. This is one of the main themes of Rousseau's educational model.[citation needed] Two adaptations ofRobinson Crusoe, published in a single volume and translated into Icelandic from Danish, were among the first secular literature ever printed in Iceland.[38]
InThe Tale of Little Pig Robinson,Beatrix Potter directs the reader toRobinson Crusoe for a detailed description of the island (the land of the Bong tree) to which her eponymous hero moves. InWilkie Collins' most popular novel,The Moonstone, one of the chief characters and narrators, Gabriel Betteredge, has faith in all that Robinson Crusoe says and uses the book for a sort ofdivination. He considersThe Adventures of Robinson Crusoe the finest book ever written, reads it over and over again, and considers a man but poorly read if he had happened not to read the book.
French novelistMichel Tournier publishedFriday, or, The Other Island (FrenchVendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique) in 1967. His novel explores themes including civilization versus nature, the psychology of solitude, as well as death and sexuality in a retelling of Defoe'sRobinson Crusoe story. Tournier's Robinson chooses to remain on the island, rejecting civilization when offered the chance to escape 28 years after being shipwrecked. Likewise, in 1963,J. M. G. Le Clézio, winner of the 2008Nobel Prize in Literature, published the novelLe Proces-Verbal. The book'sepigraph is a quote fromRobinson Crusoe, and like Crusoe, the novel's protagonist Adam Pollo suffers long periods of loneliness.
"Crusoe in England", a 183 line poem byElizabeth Bishop, imagines Crusoe near the end of his life, recalling his time of exile with a mixture of bemusement and regret.
J. M. Coetzee's 1986 novelFoe recounts the tale of Robinson Crusoe from the perspective of a woman named Susan Barton.
The term "inverted Crusoeism" was coined byJ. G. Ballard. The paradigm of Robinson Crusoe has been a recurring topic in Ballard's work.[43] Whereas the original Robinson Crusoe became acastaway against his own will, Ballard's protagonists often choose to maroon themselves; hence inverted Crusoeism (e.g.,Concrete Island). The concept provides a reason as to why people would deliberately maroon themselves on a remote island; in Ballard's work, becoming a castaway is as much a healing and empowering process as an entrapping one, enabling people to discover a more meaningful and vital existence.
The story was also illustrated and published in comic book form byClassics Illustrated in 1943 and 1957. The much improved 1957 version was inked / penciled by Sam Citron, who is most well known for his contributions to the earlier issues ofSuperman.[44] British illustrator Reginald Ben Davis drew a female version of the story titledJill Crusoe, Castaway (1950–1959).[45]
One of the first adaptations still available dates from 1932 titledMr. Robinson Crusoe. This film was produced byDouglas Fairbanks Sr and directed byEddie Sutherland. Set in Tahiti, the film depicts Steve Drexel, the main character, trying to survive on a desert island for almost a year. This film was not very successful.
Luis Buñuel directedAdventures of Robinson Crusoe starringDan O'Herlihy, released in 1954. Luis Buñuel filmed an account which at first viewing appeared to be a rather simple straightforward telling of Robinson Crusoe. A big stand out with this film is that Buñuel breaks the previous films' traditions of having Friday as a slave and Crusoe as the master. The two manage to become actually friends and they operate essentially as equals.
Variations on the theme include the 1954Miss Robin Crusoe, with a female castaway, played byAmanda Blake, and a female Friday, and in 1965 we get the film adaptationRobinson Crusoe on Mars, starringPaul Mantee, with an alien Friday portrayed byVictor Lundin and an added character played byAdam West.Byron Haskins manages to underscore Crusoe's removal and field of the red planet that we call mars. Our main character meets a Friday-esque character but makes no effort to try and understand his language. Like the book, in this film, Friday is trying to escape from cruel masters. This movie has lots of appeal to fans of adventures stories and the film has a distinctive visual style that adds to its character.
In 1968,American writer/director Ralph C. Bluemke made afamily-friendly version of the story titledRobby, in which the main characters were portrayed as children. It starred Warren Raum as Robby (Robinson Crusoe) and Ryp Siani as Friday (who were the director's first choices for the roles).[48] Bluemke originally conceived the idea while working at a bank in 1960.[49] Given the nature and location of the script, Bluemke knew from the beginning that the film would require a certain amount ofnudity in order to give it a sense of realism and authenticity. At the time, he was under the impression that the nudity depicted in the film would be condoned as natural and innocent, given the backdrop of the story, and given that the actors involved wereprepubescent boys.[50] The film failed to secure a wide distribution deal, in part because prospective distributors were wary about the extensive nudity featured in the film. Undaunted, the producers raised enough capital to release the film themselves, acting as their own distributor. It had limited screenings onBroadway inNew York City on August 14, 1968.[51]
Peter O'Toole andRichard Roundtree co-starred in a 1975 filmMan Friday which sardonically portrayed Crusoe as incapable of seeing his dark-skinned companion as anything but an inferior creature, while Friday is more enlightened and sympathetic. In 1988,Aidan Quinn portrayed Robinson Crusoe in the filmCrusoe. A 1997 movie entitledRobinson Crusoe starredPierce Brosnan and received limited commercial success. The 2000 filmCast Away, withTom Hanks as a FedEx employee stranded on an island for many years, also borrows much from the Robinson Crusoe story.
In 1988, an animated cartoon for children calledClassic Adventure Stories Robinson Crusoe was released. Crusoe's early sea travels are simplified, as his ship outruns theSalé Rovers pirates but then gets wrecked in a storm.[52]
Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe was adapted as a two-part play forBBC radio. Dramatised by Steve Chambers and directed by Marion Nancarrow, and starringRoy Marsden and Tom Bevan, it was first broadcast onBBC Radio 4 in May 1998. It was subsequently rebroadcast onBBC Radio 4 Extra in February 2023.
In 1964, a French film production crew made a 13-part serial ofThe Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. It starredRobert Hoffmann. The black-and-white series was dubbed into English and German. In the UK, the BBC broadcast it on numerous occasions between 1965 and 1977.
Two 2000s reality television series,Expedition Robinson andSurvivor, have their contestants try to survive on an isolated location, usually an island. The concept is influenced byRobinson Crusoe.
The life and strange surprizing adventures of Robinson Crusoe: of York, mariner: who lived twenty eight years all alone in an un-inhabited island on the coast of America, near the mouth of the great river of Oroonoque; ... Written by himself.,Early English Books Online, 1719.Defoe, Daniel (January 2007)."1719 text".Oxford Text Archive.hdl:20.500.14106/K061280.000.
^Full title:The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates. Written by Himself.[1]
^Drabble, Margaret, ed. (1996). "Defoe".The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. p. 265.
^Peraldo, Emmanuelle (2020-03-10).300 Years of Robinsonades. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. p. 4.ISBN978-1-5275-4840-4. Retrieved2025-08-06.And it is precisely the middle class thatIan Watt (1957) considers as a defining characteristic of the emerging genre of the novel: Watt sees the novel as a genre that developed in the social context of the rise of the Middle Class in England in the first half of the eighteenth century and Defoe has been considered by many critics, including Watt, as one of the fathers of the novel. In The Rise of the Novel; Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (whose subtitle clearly mentions Defoe as an actor in the rise of the genre), lan Watt wrote that "Robinson Crusoe is certainly the first novel in the sense that it is the first fictional narrative in which an ordinary person's daily activities are the center of continuous literary attention." (Watt 1957, 74) There have been disagreements on that issue, and some critics have voiced their hesitations on Robinson Crusoe as the first novel, in Reconsidering the Rise of the Novel (2000) for example. As for Defoe himself, he would never have called his writings "novels" and the "novel" is a label that was given by critics later in the eighteenth century.
^Haque, Amber (2004). "Psychology from Islamic perspective: Contributions of early Muslim scholars and challenges to contemporary Muslim psychologists".Journal of Religion and Health.43 (4):357–377, esp.369.doi:10.1007/s10943-004-4302-z.S2CID38740431.
^Secord, Arthur Wellesley (1963) [1924].Studies in the Narrative Method of Defoe. New York, NY: Russell & Russell. pp. 21–111.
^Watt, Ian (April 1951). "Robinson Crusoe as a myth".Essays in Criticism. Watt, Ian (1994).Robinson Crusoe as a Myth. Norton Critical Edition (Second) (reprint ed.).
^Joyce, James (1964). "Daniel Defoe".Buffalo Studies.1. Translated by Prescott, Joseph (English translation of Italian manuscript ed.):24–25.
^Hunter, J. Paul (1966).The Reluctant Pilgrim. Norton Critical Edition.
^Greif, Martin J. (Summer 1966). "The Conversion of Robinson Crusoe".SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900.6 (3):551–574.doi:10.2307/449560.JSTOR449560.
^Varian, Hal R. (1990).Intermediate microeconomics: A modern approach. New York: W.W. Norton.ISBN978-0-393-95924-6.
^Novak, Maximillian E. (Summer 1961). "Robinson Crusoe's "original sin"".SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900. Restoration and Eighteenth Century.1 (3):19–29.doi:10.2307/449302.JSTOR449302.
^Halewood, William H. (1969-02-01). "The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe's emblematic method and quest for form in Robinson Crusoe. J.Paul Hunter, Defoe, and spiritual autobiography. G.A. Starr".Modern Philology.66 (3):274–278.doi:10.1086/390091.
^West, Richard (1998).Daniel Defoe: The life and strange, surprising adventures. New York: Carroll & Graf.ISBN978-0-7867-0557-3.
^Engelking, Barbara; Libionka, Dariusz (2009).Żydzi w Powstańczej Warszawie. Warsaw, PL: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów. pp. 260–293.ISBN978-83-926831-1-7.
^Brown, Laura (2003). "Ch. 7 Oceans and Floods". InNussbaum, Felicity A. (ed.).The Global Eighteenth Century. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 109.
^Þess Svenska Gustav LandKRONS Og Þess Engelska Bertholds Faabreitileger Robinsons, Edur Liifs Og Æfe Søgur (Hólar 1756): Veturliði Óskarsson, "The Language of 19th Century Translations IV: Iceland", inThe Nordic Languages: An International Handbook of the History of the North Germanic Languages, ed. by Oskar Bandle and others, Handbücher zur Sprach- and Kommunikationswissenschaft, 22, 2 vols (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002), II pp. 1518–22 (p. 1518).
Backscheider, PaulaDaniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).ISBN0801845122.
Ewers, ChrisMobility in the English Novel from Defoe to Austen. (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2018).ISBN978-1787442726. Includes a chapter onRobinson Crusoe.
Richetti, John (ed.)The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)ISBN978-0521675055. Casebook of critical essays.
Rogers, PatRobinson Crusoe (London: Allen and Unwin, 1979).ISBN0048000027.
