Daniel Defoe
- He was born in 1660
- He was a British novelist, pamphleteer, and journalist
- He is most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe
- It is an English adventure novel
- It was first published in 1719
- The novel was written by mixing epistolary, confessional, and didactic forms
- The protagonist's complete name is Robinson Kreutznaer
- In the novel, he spends 28 years stranded on a remote tropical island near the Venezuelan coasts
- He encounters pirates, captives, mutineers, and cannibals before being rescued
- The story has been thought to be based on the life of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who lived for four years on a Pacific island
- The island, once called "Más a Tierra" (part of Chile), was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966
- In the first edition, Robinson Crusoe himself was credited as the author, which lead many readers to believe he was a real person and that the events of the book had actually happened
- The term "Robinsonade" was coined to describe the genre of stories in which the protagonist is suddenly separated from civilization, usually by being shipwrecked
- Crusoe attempts to replicate his society on the island
- He makes use of European technology and agriculture
- Crusoe refers to himself as the king of the island several times throughout the novel
- At the end of the novel, the island is referred to as "colony"
- The relationship between Crusoe and Friday can be interpreted as a master-servant relationship, with Crusoe representing the "enlightened" European while Friday is the "savage" who can only be redeemed through assimilation into Crusoe's culture
- Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels was published seven years after Robinson Crusoe, and may be interpreted as a rebuttal of Defoe's optimistic account of human capability
