Robinson Crusoe
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published in 1719 and sometimes regarded as the first novel in English. The book is a fictional autobiography of the title character, an English castaway who spends 28 years on a remote island, encountering savages, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. This device, presenting an account of supposedly factual events, is known as a "false document", and gives a realistic frame story. The story was probably influenced by the real-life events of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway marooned on a Pacific island for four years.
The full title of the novel is The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner: who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an uninhabited Island on the coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pirates. Written by Himself.
Praise
"There exists one book," Rousseau wrote, "which, to my taste, furnishes the happiest treatise of natural education. What then is this marvelous book? Is it Aristotle? Pliny? Is it Buffon? No - it is Robinson Crusoe.' (Emile, ou De l'education (1762).
