Daniel Defoe
Published: 2019-05-29
Total Pages: 336
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-Daniel Defoe Biography-Alternative Titles: -Places Discussed-Character List-Themes-Setting of the Novel-Character Map-More than 20 IllustrationsRobinson Crusoe, in full The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who Lived Eight and Twenty Years, All Alone in an Un-inhabited 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's by Pyrates. Written by Himself., novel by Daniel Defoe, first published in London in 1719. Defoe's first long work of fiction, it introduced two of the most-enduring characters in English literature: Robinson Crusoe and Friday.Crusoe is the novel's narrator. He describes how, as a headstrong young man, he ignored his family's advice and left his comfortable middle-class home in England to go to sea. His first experience on a ship nearly kills him, but he perseveres, and a voyage to Guinea "made me both a Sailor and a Merchant," Crusoe explains. Now several hundred pounds richer, he sails again for Africa but is captured by pirates and sold into slavery. He escapes and ends up in Brazil, where he acquires a plantation and prospers. Ambitious for more wealth, Crusoe makes a deal with merchants and other plantation owners to sail to Guinea, buy slaves, and return with them to Brazil. But he encounters a storm in the Caribbean, and his ship is nearly destroyed. Crusoe is the only survivor, washed up onto a desolate shore. He salvages what he can from the wreck and establishes a life on the island that consists of spiritual reflection and practical measures to survive. He carefully documents in a journal everything he does and experiences.After many years, Crusoe discovers a human footprint, and he eventually encounters a group of native peoples-the "Savages," as he calls them-who bring captives to the island so as to kill and eat them. One of the group's captives escapes, and Crusoe shoots those who pursue him, effectively freeing the captive. As Crusoe describes one of his earliest interactions with the man, just hours after his escape: Setting of the NovelCrusoe begins his journey in September 1659 and travels to Africa, Brazil, and a lost island in the Atlantic. He moves primarily through and around the Atlantic Ocean. In this sense, the setting of the novel is a transatlantic one. The significance of this setting is that it is also the primary location of eighteenth-century trade routes - including the slave trade.Defoe took a new literary path in 1719, around the age of 59, when he published Robinson Crusoe, a fiction novel based on several short essays that he had composed over the years. A handful of novels followed soon after-often with rogues and criminals as lead characters-including Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, Captain Singleton, Journal of the Plague Year and his last major fiction piece, Roxana (1724).