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Robinson Crusoe and the Variability of Life

Maximillian E. Novak

in Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions: His Life and Works

For all the writing that Daniel Defoe had done before the composition of Robinson Crusoe, indeed for all the prose fiction that he had written, Robinson Crusoe must have come to him as almost as ... More

For all the writing that Daniel Defoe had done before the composition of Robinson Crusoe, indeed for all the prose fiction that he had written, Robinson Crusoe must have come to him as almost as wonderful a surprise as it was to his readers. To modern critics, Robinson Crusoe has appeared as an economic parable, a spiritual autobiography, an adventure story, and a fable illustrating human development and education. The problem of interpretation arose almost immediately with Charles Gildon’s forceful critical assault on the work, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of D[aniel] De F[oe]. The shaping of Robinson Crusoe was, of course, anything but pure inspiration. The most obvious source for the island episode is to be found in well-publicised accounts of a sailor named Alexander Selkirk. Jay Fliegelman has pointed out that Robinson Crusoe was one of the texts revised better to suit readers in a nation that was in the process of throwing off all ties to the parent state.Less

/ Castaway Colonialism: Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's Account

Adam Lifshey

in Specters of Conquest: Indigenous Absence in Transatlantic Literatures

Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe in 1719, not long after Francisco Ximénez saw, copied, and translated the Popol Vuh in Guatemala. There is no direct connection between the two narratives, yet ... More

Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe in 1719, not long after Francisco Ximénez saw, copied, and translated the Popol Vuh in Guatemala. There is no direct connection between the two narratives, yet both manifest absence as a contestatory transatlantic phenomenon. With respect to Columbus's diary of his first voyage, Defoe's novel is further removed in time from it than from the Ximénez manuscript but closer in orientation due to its accounting of another European sailor who encounters unfamiliar land in the Caribbean. On the island in Robinson Crusoe there are no indigenes available immediately to conquer and it is the European who begins in a position of relative weakness, so it takes Crusoe longer than Columbus to incorporate subjects into empire.Less

Cross-Grained Crusoe: Defoe and the Contradictions of Englishness

Patrick Parrinder

in Nation & Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day

One of the most notable novelists who wrote about nationality was Daniel Defoe. His most popular work was Robinson Crusoe. This story portrays an archetypal Englishman. His life is discussed in ... More

One of the most notable novelists who wrote about nationality was Daniel Defoe. His most popular work was Robinson Crusoe. This story portrays an archetypal Englishman. His life is discussed in passing in this chapter in order to show how it influenced the way Defoe wrote. From 1704–12, he became a commentator and a government agent. Several of his works are analysed in the chapter in order to spot inconsistencies of thought that defined him as an Englishman.Less

Towards the Last of the Race: Robinson Crusoe as Sole Survivor

Fiona J. Stafford

in The Last of the Race: The Growth of a Myth from Milton to Darwin

Daniel Defoe's explorations of individualism in Robinson Crusoe, the narrative of a single man who lives alone for years on a remote island off the South American coast, has made the narration ... More

Daniel Defoe's explorations of individualism in Robinson Crusoe, the narrative of a single man who lives alone for years on a remote island off the South American coast, has made the narration obvious material for twentieth-century readers interested in seventeeth-century individualism, both in the economic and spiritual aspects. With the emerging emphasis on colonialism, familial patterns, and national consciousness, focus has been shifting more to the influence of the lost race, with which the solitary hero must not be defined. Defoe also explores the relationships between the lonely narrator, his family, and his native culture. Crusoe is an important forerunner of the last of the race owing to his prolonged experience of total isolation.Less

Oppen’s Silence, Crusoe’s Silence, and the Silence of Other Minds

Oren Izenberg

in Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life

This chapter examines the long silence at the center of George Oppen's poetic career, arguing that it was driven in part by his early choice of left-political activism over art. After the 1934 ... More

This chapter examines the long silence at the center of George Oppen's poetic career, arguing that it was driven in part by his early choice of left-political activism over art. After the 1934 publication of his Discrete Series, Oppen stopped writing poems and lived, starting in 1950, as a “known subversive” in Mexico. He would resurface in 1962 with the publication of The Materials. Focusing on the figure of Robinson Crusoe, this chapter offers an account of Oppen's poetic knowledge in relation to aesthetics and to the idea of a poetic politics. It also considers Oppen's reconceptualization of what it means “to know” and its relevance to the question of social recognition. It suggests that Oppen's return to poetry was contingent upon his conceptualization of the rigorous charity of his silence and his discovery of a way to make such silence audible.Less

The Novel as ‘Moletta’: Cervantes and Defoe

Diana de Armas Wilson

in Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World

This chapter examines the idea that Cervantes's Persiles provided the ‘germ’ of Robinson Crusoe. Aiming for coevolutionary histories of the novel as alternatives to evolutionary ones, it focuses less ... More

This chapter examines the idea that Cervantes's Persiles provided the ‘germ’ of Robinson Crusoe. Aiming for coevolutionary histories of the novel as alternatives to evolutionary ones, it focuses less on historical origins than on geographical entities; specifically, places and people in the New Wolrd that challenged old forms of thought. It examines Defoe's continued interest in the Spanish Indies for both his colonial propaganda and his novelizing. It also suggests here, the debt of both writers to the Caribbean cannibals.Less

The Accidental Doctor: Physics and Metaphysics in Robinson Crusoe

Christopher R. Miller

in Surprise: The Poetics of the Unexpected from Milton to Austen

This chapter examines the poetics of surprise in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. It considers surprise in relation to bourgeois individualism and the rise of industrial capitalism, Puritan traditions ... More

This chapter examines the poetics of surprise in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. It considers surprise in relation to bourgeois individualism and the rise of industrial capitalism, Puritan traditions of introspection and allegory, and European imperialism and its forms of exploitation and violence. It also discusses several emblematic and interrelated species of surprise: the gunshot or detonation of gunpowder; natural phenomena both dangerous (lightning, earthquakes) and benign (the growth and generation of plants and animal life); a single footprint in the sand and the subsequent arrival of a friendly stranger. Finally, it highlights the flaw in Crusoe's attempt at risk management as well as the perennial surprise of Crusoe's own strange—and self-estranging—thoughts.Less

After Crusoe:: Pirate Adventures, Military Memoirs and the South Sea Scandal

Maximillian E. Novak

in Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions: His Life and Works

The success of Robinson Crusoe did not appear to change Daniel Defoe’s reputation very much with his fellow authors. Prose fiction was not yet a respectable genre, and Charles Gildon had already ... More

The success of Robinson Crusoe did not appear to change Daniel Defoe’s reputation very much with his fellow authors. Prose fiction was not yet a respectable genre, and Charles Gildon had already expressed his contempt for Robinson Crusoe. Defoe’s eventual shift toward fiction and toward works focused on voyages to distant lands, on economic geography, and on the occult certainly reflected his interests, but he was surely responding to what he thought to be the tastes of the reading public. The Anatomy of Exchange Alley, Defoe’s first substantial attack upon the South Sea Company, was published on July 1, 1719. The South Sea Company had been approved by Queen Anne on June 12, 1711, and was part of Robert Harley’s plan to diminish the power of the Bank of England and the Whigs who supported it. Another work, Memoirs of a Cavalier, looked back to the military memoirs that Defoe partly wrote and partly edited during the previous five years.Less

Caribbean to China: Crusoe’s Two Adventures

Ning Ma

in The Age of Silver: The Rise of the Novel East and West

This chapter argues that the novels of Daniel Defoe represent not so much an “origin” as a belated response to global early modernities, and examines in this context the neglected second half of ... More

This chapter argues that the novels of Daniel Defoe represent not so much an “origin” as a belated response to global early modernities, and examines in this context the neglected second half of Robinson Crusoe, in which the protagonist travels to the East as a trader. The sequel’s pronounced anxiety toward Asian economic and technological advancements implicitly structures the trope of island survival and self-sufficiency in the book’s famous first part. Whereas Crusoe’s individuality combines capitalism and colonial elements in a fashion atypical of global narrative realisms during the Age of Silver, Defoe’s later works Moll Flanders and Roxana return to the social setting and present more complex treatments of the socioeconomic transitions of the period through the transgressive figure of the “fallen woman.” Overall, Defoe’s novels constitute one local variation of global literary shifts, rather than the unique embodiment of novelistic modernity.Less

Language as Medium, Language as Message

Monika Baár

in Historians and Nationalism: East-Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century

Chapter 5, ‘Language as Medium, Language as Message’, is dedicated to the role of language in the scholars' life‐work. It discusses their contribution to the renewal of the national language. It ... More

Chapter 5, ‘Language as Medium, Language as Message’, is dedicated to the role of language in the scholars' life‐work. It discusses their contribution to the renewal of the national language. It demonstrates the possibilities which language provided for arguments about the antiquity, continuity, unity and uniqueness of national history. It then goes on to address problems of intellectual transfer, originality and imitation. On the basis of textual analysis an attempt is made to illustrate how translations and adaptations were exploited as shortcuts in the process of creating national culture. These include the Lithuanian version of Robinson Crusoe, translations of historiographical texts from German into Hungarian and the use of translations for the creation of modern political language in Romania.Less

Novel Subjects and Enabling Fictions: the Formal Articulation of International Human Rights Law

Joseph R. Slaughter

in Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law

The United Nations delegates' encryption of Robinson Crusoe within the text of Article 29 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights, illustrates something of the historical cooperation between the ... More

The United Nations delegates' encryption of Robinson Crusoe within the text of Article 29 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights, illustrates something of the historical cooperation between the novel and human rights between what is typically regarded as the sociocultural work of literature and the civil and political work of law. This chapter focuses on the formal, historical, rhetorical, and institutional conditions of international human rights law that make it especially dependent upon cultural forms to give its precepts moral force. It begins by analyzing the image of the human person, and the development of its personality, that the law both takes for granted and articulates, situating this figure at the intersection of natural and positive law approaches to personhood. Abstract rhetorical structures of the law in the chapter become most technically refined and commonly legible in the literary conventions of the Bildungsroman.Less

Suspended Animation: Vendredi ou Les limbes du Pacifique

in Michel Tournier and the Metaphor of Fiction

This chapter, which analyses the use of metaphor in Michael Tournier's first novel Vendredi ou Les limbes du Pacifique, suggests that this novel investigates the possibilities inherent in a ... More

This chapter, which analyses the use of metaphor in Michael Tournier's first novel Vendredi ou Les limbes du Pacifique, suggests that this novel investigates the possibilities inherent in a philosophy of language and contains the initial parameters of Tournier's figurative discourse. It highlights the significant influence of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and mentions that Tournier admitted consulting with Alexander Selkirk, the original Robinson Crusoe and real-life inspiration to Defoe.Less

Novel Atmographies: Eighteenth-Century Weather Writing and the Atmospheres of Robinson Crusoe

Jayne Elizabeth Lewis

in Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660–1794

Daniel Defoe’s turbulent prose gives away his personal interest toward what he termed “the History and Reality of Apparitions,” not to mention his apparent interest in weather—both of which can be ... More

Daniel Defoe’s turbulent prose gives away his personal interest toward what he termed “the History and Reality of Apparitions,” not to mention his apparent interest in weather—both of which can be gleaned from his influential Robinson Crusoe. This and another of Defoe’s works, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), both contain an expanse of environment and atmosphere that ushered British literary fiction into a new wave. Robinson Crusoe’s eponymous protagonist is shown to have a keen obsession with the bewildering atmospheric events occurring about him. In him is such a need to master the cycle of the seasons and decipher what it is that God is trying to tell him that he begins writing a journal to chronicle the weather. In this chapter, then, the author takes a deeper look at the atmospheric dimension of Robinson Crusoe in light of contemporary English weather writing.Less

Robinson Crusoe, Anthropology, and the Horizon of Technology

Peter Redfield

in Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana

This chapter illustrates Kourou's first development in the 1960s and the basic structure of the contemporary space center, laying the terminological and disciplinary groundwork on Robinson Crusoe. It ... More

This chapter illustrates Kourou's first development in the 1960s and the basic structure of the contemporary space center, laying the terminological and disciplinary groundwork on Robinson Crusoe. It discusses everyday problems of Crusoe's condition and his numerous adventures before arriving on the island, and discusses more after leaving; he was taken slave before he took his own, and found a plantation in Brazil before his fateful voyage. Crusoe marooned was a man painfully displaced. Yet he has, in some senses, always been so, a point worth underscoring. Crusoe, despite his taste for adventure, did not remain an explorer; he became, however unwillingly, a colonist. This condition separates his account from many earlier travel tales of adventurers and merchants, Odysseus to Sinbad. The explorer has come to rest, and in proving himself cosmopolitan, he reworked his body and soul: the island inspires Crusoe to his closest encounter with both spiritual anguish and the material conditions of life.Less

The Slave¹

Judith Still

in Derrida and Other Animals: The Boundaries of the Human

This chapter takes off from Derrida’s examination of the relationship between the sovereign and the people in Early Modern political philosophy, notably Rousseau’s Social Contract and Rousseau’s ... More

This chapter takes off from Derrida’s examination of the relationship between the sovereign and the people in Early Modern political philosophy, notably Rousseau’s Social Contract and Rousseau’s interlocutors (Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes); and from Derrida’s analysis of servitude or slavery in Robinson Crusoe. It sets this in the context of other Enlightenment writings on slavery and abolition (e.g. returning to the Encyclopédie), and to representations of slavery in the Americas more generally, including the English and French versions of the Letters from an American Farmer by the founding father of American identity, Crèvecoeur. Like the savage, the slave exists on the borderline between what is set up as the human and what is set up as the animal. Supporters of slavery put forward the hypothesis of natural slaves who are (like) animals; abolitionists, including former slaves, focus on the bestialisation of human beings who are forced to be property as domestic animals are. Debates over the precise definition of a slave, and over the distinction between figural and literal slaves, also have a purchase on modern slavery and the difficulty of drafting legislation.Less

They Were Prodigals and Enslavers: Patriarchy and the Reading of Robinson Crusoe at the New York Society Library

Sean D. Moore

in Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731-1814

This chapter examines the founding of the New York Society Library as part of the trend of merchants made wealthy by slavery and related commerce establishing philanthropic and civil society ... More

This chapter examines the founding of the New York Society Library as part of the trend of merchants made wealthy by slavery and related commerce establishing philanthropic and civil society institutions in the mid- and late eighteenth century. By mapping the reading network around Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in this library, it establishes that almost all of its readers from 1789–90 supported Defoe’s pro-slavery views as articulated by Crusoe’s choice to go to sea to engage in the Africa trade, and how most American editions of the novel advocated young men doing the same. The library’s City Readers database also makes it easy to inventory the other books that readers of Crusoe were reading in order to gauge the level of pro-slavery versus Manumission Society sentiment. In doing so, it provides a portrait of New York society as one in which whites of every background benefited from the slave trade.Less

Reinventing the Wheel: Of Sovereignty, Autobiography, and Deconstruction

Michael Naas

in The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida's Final Seminar

This chapter looks at the life of Robinson Crusoe and how he made things around him for his convenience and comfort. To Derrida, Robinson's situation brings up questions of autobiography and the ... More

This chapter looks at the life of Robinson Crusoe and how he made things around him for his convenience and comfort. To Derrida, Robinson's situation brings up questions of autobiography and the world that would result from an analysis of Crusoe's creations or inventions. An autobiography is compared to the figure of a wheel where the self takes a detour but eventually returns to himself in the process of self-discovery. The main theme of Derrida in these terms is the impossibility of returning home, or the point of one's departure, or even the preoccupation of deconstruction. Deconstruction is even considered as the beginning of the reinvention of the wheel, the end of the circle of thinking to start and take on a new journey and new self-identity. He questions the importance of returning, circularity, and homecoming in “Violence and Metaphysics.” In the end, Derrida speaks that in returning, there is always iteration, original difference, and supplementarity because for every one turn of the wheel, there is always added another point of departure where one can start from.Less

Rethinking the Real with Robinson Crusoe and David Hume

Sarah Tindal Kareem

in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder

This chapter turns to Defoe’s Crusoe and Hume’s Treatise to show how wonder emerges as a response to the ordinary in the wake of an epistemological crisis that precipitates a renewed sense of life’s ... More

This chapter turns to Defoe’s Crusoe and Hume’s Treatise to show how wonder emerges as a response to the ordinary in the wake of an epistemological crisis that precipitates a renewed sense of life’s contingency. Both texts employ Puritan spiritual autobiography and, in each case, this literary mode’s questionable referential status reproduces the epistemological uncertainty that Crusoe and Hume face. Crusoe and Hume model how such epistemological uncertainty might be a source of pleasing wonder by exhibiting an attitude of viewing the ordinary as if it were rare, and the illusory as if it were real—and by extension the real as if it were illusory. The chapter suggests that this capacity to illuminate the extraordinary within the ordinary and the illusory within the real becomes one of novelistic fiction’s distinctive characteristics. A coda to this chapter suggests that the indeterminacy identified in Crusoe persists in Gulliver’s Travels (1726).Less

Pray Tell: Derrida’s Performative Justice

Michael Naas

in The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida's Final Seminar

This chapter is about the theme of prayer, where the isolation of Robinson Crusoe on the island is seen as an involvement and apprenticeship in prayer. Because of this metaphor, Derrida's “The Beast ... More

This chapter is about the theme of prayer, where the isolation of Robinson Crusoe on the island is seen as an involvement and apprenticeship in prayer. Because of this metaphor, Derrida's “The Beast and the Sovereign” seminar can be viewed as a meditation on prayer. The special performative function of prayer and again, the question of distinction between man and animal is raised. Sovereignty is raised in the process through the person of Robinson Crusoe. If Crusoe reinvented the wheel because he needed and wanted to, there is also a relationship that praying became a turn of the wheel, an automatic response, without his full intention, toward an unknown other. Derrida surmises that if prayer is authentic, not because of some genuineness and sincerity of intention, or to some God, then it has to be authentic because of its conditions of performativity. This chapter concludes that “The Beast and the Sovereign” has not only analyzed prayer in the context of Heidegger and Crusoe but has also manifested the law of prayer.Less