Title: The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner

By - Daniel Defoe

Publishing Info: Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Michael Shinagel. New York: Norton, 1975.

Genre: Novel

Sub-genre: - Adventure

Nationality: - British

Time Period: - 18th Century

First and Last Read by Dr. Rearick - Feb. 1983 / Feb. 2000

Rated: - A+

Use: The Novel

Location: - Dr. Rearick's Home and Office and E-text can be found on Main frame

The Defoe Page Provides a biographical sketch and a chronology of Defoe's work. Links to one electronic text

Scripture that comes to mind:

"Then the LORD sent a great wind on the sea, and such a violent storm arose that the

ship threatened to break up."

Jonah 1:4

"He stilled the storm to a whisper; the waves of the sea were hushed."

Psalms 107:29

Comments: The earliest English novel written by a man who never admitted he wrote a novel. he wrote to what Walter Allen called in The English Novel a "spoof autobiography" (25). Allen earlier notes that Defoe, the father of the novel, cared nothing for art or artistic theory; in fact his relation to art is like that of a forger--only he wasn't forging art, he was "forging transcripts of actual experiences" (24).

Robinson Crusoe is first of all a masterpiece of verisimilitude--Allen writes that Defoe. . .

The smaller lies have conditioned us to accept the bigger one. It is certainly incredible enough: Crusoe is on his island twenty-eight years, two months, and nineteen days. The exactitude is characteristic (26).

One must always keep in mind the two sides of Crusoe--the religious and the practical. Sometimes they do not mix well. Ian Watt writes that "We do not find Crusoe's religious ruminations very convincing; they are, like boats of benign malaria, easily shaken off, and indicating no organic spiritual change. As soon as he remembers that previously he had shook a bag of chickens meat out in that place ". . .his wonder ceases; and as a result he confesses that ". . .my religious thankfulness to God's providence began to abate too upon the discovery that all this was nothing but what was common." The same primacy of non-religious considerations is evident in the book as a whole. For of course Crusoe is well rewarded for his sins: without them he would have hardly have risen above the 'middle station of low-life' to which he had been born, and become a wealthy merchant, plantation owner, slaver trader and colonizer" (From Dryden to Johnson, Vol. 4 of The Pelican Guide to English Literature 209).

The novel is a favorite in Children's Literature and is mentioned in the Britania's coverage of Children's Lit this way:

The entire pre-1744 period [in British Children's Literature] is redeemed by two works of genius. Neither Robinson Crusoe nor Gulliver's Travels was meant for children. Immediately abridged and bowdlerized, they were seized upon by the prosperous young. The poorer ones, the great majority, had to wait for the beginning of the cheap reprint era. Both books fathered an immense progeny in the children's field. Defoe engendered a whole school of Robinsonnades" in most European countries, the most famous example being Wyss's Swiss Family Robinson (1812-13).

                   "The Art of Literature: CHILDREN'S LITERATURE: HISTORICAL SKETCHES OF
                   THE MAJOR LITERATURES: England.: Prehistory (early Middle Ages to 1712)."
                   Britannica Online.
                   <http://www.eb.com:180/cgi-bin/g?DocF=macro/5003/81/385.html>
                   [Accessed 02 March 1998].

Science fiction has also provided some interesting twists. There is the film Robinson Crusoe on Mars and combining children's

appeal and science fiction Just I must mention the Space family Robinson of Lost in Space fame as still another manifestation of "Robinsonades.

Even though Robinson Crusoe can be enjoyed simply as an adventure story, Allen points out that "the reader who returns to it today, as an adult, cannot fail to see in it more than the adventures of the castaway on an uninhabited island. Indeed, simply by describing those adventures, Defoe had done more: he had dramatized as sharply as possible it inescapable solitariness of each man in his relation to God and the universe, and it is the index of his triumph with his hero, that Crusoe still remains adequate as a representative of the human being in this timeless situation" (28-29).