Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe

Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) is one of the best studied and most widely invoked fictions in the Western literary canon. It is usually cited as one of—it not the—first novels written in English, and has been central to accounts of the genre’s interactions with class, race, age, gender, religion, colonialism, politics, economics, and social thought. Beyond the boundaries of novel studies, it is also central to histories of other literary genres, from children’s literature to travel writing to spiritual autobiography. Perhaps as a result of its ability to shapeshift across genres and forms, Robinson Crusoe has been one of the most consistent steady-sellers in literary history. It has never been out of print in the three centuries since it was originally published, and it has been reprinted in over one hundred languages, in formats ranging from ephemeral chapbooks for children to elegant collectors’ copies. Despite its fame and endurance—or maybe because of it—many people know Robinson Crusoe without having read it. Many readers, for instance, are unaware that Defoe wrote three books in the Robinson Crusoe trilogy: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (1719), The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), and Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe (1720). And because some of the most widely circulated versions of the story were substantively revised and abridged variants, many readers’ sense of the story’s plot, characters, and embedded lessons are the result of interventions by publishers, printers, booksellers, and critics who have popularized versions other than those Defoe authorized during his lifetime. The following bibliography is imagined as a point of entry for scholars interested in understanding Robinson Crusoe and its legacies within its many transhistorical, transnational, multimedia contexts. The sources selected represent a range of perspectives and approaches, but nearly all of them acknowledge that Robinson Crusoe is best understood not as a stable, historical urtext, but rather as a plurality—a bibliographically, interpretively, ideologically, and materially complex archive that has shifted and adapted over time and across space, and remained startlingly relevant as a result.