• 1660 Daniel Defoe was born in London.
• 1683 as a merchant he travelled around Europe.
• 1702 He wrote his famous pamphlet The Shortest Way with the Dissenters.
• 1703 Defoe was arrested because of the irony towards religion contained in his pamphlet, released in return for services as a pamphleteer (a writer of political propaganda) and a spy for the Tory
• 1719 He started writing prose at the age of fifty-nine.
• 1731 Daniel Defoe died in London
Defoe published his first novel, The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner in 1719. The story was based partly on the memoirs of voyagers and castaways.
•I in 1722 he published Moll Flanders, the fictional autobiography of a prostitute, as well as A Journal of the Plague Year, an account of the plague which struck London in 1665. His last great work of fiction, Roxana, appeared in 1724. Defoe is considered the founder of the English novel.
The story of Robinson Crusoe is the most famous adventure story in English literature. It tells the story of a man who is shipwrecked off a desert island where he spends the next 28 years before being rescued. The story is divided into three parts:
•Part 1
Crusoe’s early life After a series of adventures, Crusoe is in Brazil as a rich plantation owner . In his travel to Africa to procure slaves, he is shipwrecked and the only survivor on a island.
•Part 2
in the form of a journal, Crusoe writes about life on the island, how overcome the difficulties to become the master of the island. He encounters a ‘savage’, he calls him Friday and converts him to Christianity.
•Part 3
The third and final part of the book tells of their rescue and of Crusoe’s return to England with Friday as a servant.
Stylistic features and themes
Robinson Crusoe is written in the first-person, in the form of an autobiography. The book has a detailed verisimilitude, which made readers believe at first that it was an authentic story. The style of the narrative is plain. We don’t know Crusoe’s thoughts or feelings but only his actions and what physically happens to him . Crusoe’s tells the reader the things that happen to him in a diary-like sequence.
Interpretations
Robinson Crusoe is open to several interpretations:
1 The religious allegory
a Puritan tract about man’s redemption from sin. The Puritans believed that man must save himself from original sin through his labour and self-reliance. The island on which Crusoe is shipwrecked is at first an ‘island of despair’. But gradually, through his virtues of intelligence and hard work, he transforms it into a paradise of which he is master.
2 The economic allegory:the ‘mini-civilisation’, which Crusoe establishes on the island, is similar to the society from which he comes, he regards it as his property. Crusoe embodies the values of the self-made man.
3 The imperialist allegory
Robinson Crusoe can be considered an allegory of British imperialism and the inherent idea of superiority over the native Friday, who must be civilised and converted to Christianity. His logic follows that of the British government, who saw it as its right to conquer and control parts of Africa and India.