Daniel Defoe and Abandoned Life

The Crusoe Trilogy and the Critics During the last two decades, feminist, Marxist, and New Historicist critics have transformed our understanding of the eighteenth-century novel, but none of them has questioned the iconic status of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Even those critics skeptical of the hero's justifications for colonizing ''his'' island accept the commonplace that Defoe's first novel transmutes the raw material of Puritanical injunction and moral self-scrutiny into the psychological realism that helps define the novel form. In turn, Crusoe's individualistic psychology, most critics agree, marks the transition from a residual aristocratic to an emergent bourgeois, capitalist, and (since the 1980s) broadly Foucauldian ideology of selfhood. The titles of many of these critics' works-centering on ''rises'' and ''origins''-reveal a tendency to write the history of modern identity, the rise of the novel, and the rise of financial capitalism in mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing terms. 1 Paradoxically, Robinson Crusoe retains its crucial role in revisionist histories of the novel precisely because Defoe can be credited with (or blamed for) developing a colonialist model of subjectivity: conquering the wilderness and exploiting the labor of native peoples allow the colonizer the luxury of becoming a bourgeois subject. 2 Seen in this light, Crusoe's economic moralizing and religious proselytizing may not quite open a window to the soul, but they do offer a compelling novelistic strategy for representing the psychological complexities of Defoe's reluctant pilgrim. This consensus view of Robinson Crusoe, however, holds up only if critics ignore or explain away the two sequels that Defoe published shortly after his successful first novel. In this essay, I call into question some of the assumptions and values that

One of the most iconic scenes in the most reprinted and widely circulated novel in the history of English literature is Robinson Crusoe deliberating upon the value of the assorted currency he discovers in the locker of his wrecked slave ship: 1

Exam paper, Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies, Copenhagen University, 2019

In the following essay, I deal with the representation of the middle classes and their values in Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe. The central problem is the manner in which Crusoe’s behaviour and situation clash with his father’s portrayal of the opportunities and proper conduct of a middle-class individual. I claim that this conflict represents a crisis of cultural values opened up by the altered role that the middle-class merchant comes to play in the expansion of European capitalism to overseas territories. Furthermore, I seek to show that the conflict displays a structural continuity of capitalist dynamics as well as a radical rearrangement of individual ego-consciousness—and that both the continuity and the disruptive change are legible in Crusoe’s conduct and reflections, not least his providence-oriented spirituality.

Faculty of Letters Journal of Social Sciences, 2023

Daniel Defoe's masterpiece, Robinson Crusoe, has never been studied from the point of view of the contrasting beliefs of Leavers and Takers first coined by Daniel Quinn in his novel Ishmael in 1992, which is believed to remain central throughout the story. This research offers a comprehensive analysis of these mindsets, exploring their effects on the protagonist's journey. The Leavers embrace a harmonious existence with nature, valuing sustainability and interdependence with the environment, while the Takers adopt a dominant stance, seeking to exploit nature's resources for human progress. Crusoe's character development portrays a transition from a conventional Taker to a Leaver as he recognizes the importance of sustainable practices and interconnectedness of life. The study also investigates the wider implications of Leaver and Taker concepts in societal and environmental contexts as seen in Robinson Crusoe. It explores Crusoe's intercultural exchange with a native companion on the island, symbolizing the clash between Leaver and Taker mentalities. This encounter challenges the characters' preconceptions and provides insights into cultural diversity's impact on individual perspectives. Robinson Crusoe offers a thought-provoking exploration of Leaver and Taker concepts, prompting readers to ponder their connection with the other societies and the potential for harmonious coexistence. The novel encourages contemplation of humanity's role within the natural world, rendering it a compelling narrative with timeless significance beyond its historical setting.

300 Jahre "Robinson Crusoe"

2019 marked the tercentenary of the publication of one of the most popular works in the history of the English novel, one that has been reproduced, translated, parodied more than anyotheroverthe past three centuries. When TheLife and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York,Mariner appeared on the 25 April 1719,f ew of its first readers could have anticipated the sensation that it would become. By the time of its authorʼsdeath in 1731, twelve years after the novel'sfirst appearance,the story of the castawaymarooned on his inhospitable island had become so familiar to British and overseas readers that it had spawned ar emarkable number of imitators.I nt hats amey ear,Johann Gottfried Schnabel, in the prefacet oa ne arly imitation, Die Insel Felsenburg,c oined the term 'Robinsonade' to describe the phenomenon. Thereafter Robinsonades would continue to be remediated and translated in vast numbers, in chapbooks, illustrated children'se ditions, religious tracts, lantern shows, pantomimes, and later in films and cartoons. J.M. Coetzee, who achievedsuccess with his own rewriting of the classic tale with the novel Foe,u sed his Nobel Prize speech of 2003 to meditate on the strangew ayst hat Defoeʼsb ook had been appropriated over the generations. Coetzee has Robinson cast his plagiarists,t ranslators,a nd adapters as ac annibal horde, who 'soughttostrike me down and roast me and devour me.' Thinking that he was defending himself against these corruptors of his ownhistory,Coetzee'sC rusoe comes to realise that 'these cannibals were but figures of am ore devilish voracity,that would gnawa tt he very substance of truth.'¹ If, as Harold Bloom argued in TheAnxiety of Influence, manybelated readings are acts of misreading-deliberate or otherwise-then Defoe'snovel must surelybeone of the texts par excellence through which such acts of literary cannibalism have taken place.² Even today, Robinson Crusoe continues to present achallengetoevenits most confident readers who continue to engageinwhat Coetzee called 'gnawing at the truth'. This is hardlysurprising.The book Defoe left the public in 1719 maybecompelling but it is also rambling, uneven, and often bewildering. Virginia Woolf, an

The Imaginative Conservative, 2020

The essay is a discussion of Defoe’s novel as an oscillation between a search for a Divine providential meaning in the plights of existence and a more secular interpretation of phenomena. The essay shows how Crusoe as narrator tries to reflect back on his journey as a sort of spiritual self-discovery; however, his own actions and deepest passions (in the form of his naturalistic interpretation of events on the island as well as his excessive attachment to wealth) undermine this spiritual orientation. This oscillation between the explanatory frameworks offered by Christianity and secular modernity, I assert, make the novel still relevant and powerful for us today.

Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2023

Charting an anti-colonial or even postcolonial current, this article recovers ironic and satirical meanings in Robinson Crusoe. After he leaves the island, Crusoe trades isolation for commercial opportunities in Asia. Alongside other books plundered by Defoe, Dampier’s Voyages is comparable because the pirate-navigator-cartographer is one among many models. As Defoe was negotiating the politics of the English Royal Court at the time of the wars of the Spanish succession, the Farther Adventures (book two) involves Crusoe in a transformative crisis. Reading Defoe and Dampier together supports an argument about postcoloniality, understood in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ironic and restricted sense of a critical broadside against the decolonial hoax that smuggles in neocolonial ideologies. In parallel with Dampier, Crusoe ends up hauling opium from Bengal and running from the East India Company in Cochinchina (present day Vietnam), as Defoe launches a Lockean critique of violence, and profit remains the currency of the realm.

2017

The aim of this research paper is to offer a postcolonial interpretative reading of Daniel Defoe’s magnum opus Robinson Crusoe. For years the text has been appreciated as a classic text of adventure, a tale of individualism, capitalism and also of spiritual growth. It has been studied as an exemplary text representing the liberal, adventurous and progressive spirit of the age. And while postcolonial elements in the narrative have been discussed before, critical readings of the text have not laid enough focus on the extreme denigration and essentialization of the native culture and religion and the repeated acts of assault on nature and animals that the ruler/colonialist, Crusoe engages in the fiction. This paper seeks to explore this gap in the field of critical inquiry with respect to the text of Robinson Crusoe.

MARX PROFFERS THIS IRONIC ASIDE as a comment on the history of economic thought (he is thinking, his footnote explains, of David Ricardo):

Eighteenth-Century Life, 2020