Biographical Materials and Works

Contexts​ and Critical Approaches

Editions available at Project Gutenberg

Illustrations — Sitemaps

Bibliography of Selected Primary Materials

Defoe, Daniel. The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. A new and improved edition, interspersed with reflections, religious and moral. Adorned with engravings. London: J. Harris, 1818.

Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Written by Himself. Illustrated by Thomas Stothard; engraving by C. Heath. London: Bliss, Sands, and Foster, 1820.

Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, with introductory verses by Bernard Barton, and illustrated with numerous engravings from drawings by George Cruikshank expressly designed for this edition. 2 vols. London: Printed at the Shakespeare Press, by W. Nichol, for John Major, Fleet Street, 1831.

Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Surprising 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'd by pyrates, written by himself. Introduction by J.M. Coetzee. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Ed. Thomas Keymer with notes by Thomas Keymer and James Kelly. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Bibliography of Selected Secondary Materials

[See Defoe’s biography for biographical studies.]

Allen, Walter. "The Beginnings." The English Novel: A Short Critical History. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954. Pp. 21-42.

Bell, Bill. “A Castaway among Cannibals: 300 Years of Robinson Crusoe.” Times Literary Supplement (31 May 2019): 7-9.

An important survey of the ways Defoe’s novel has been interpreted and misinterpreted since its publication.

Brantlinger, Patrick. Taming cannibals: Race and the Victorians. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011.

Critical Essays on Daniel Defoe . Ed. Roger D. Lund. New York: G.K. Hall & London: Prentice Hall International, c1997.

The Cambridge companion to Daniel Defoe. Ed. John Richetti. Cambridge, U.K.& New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Frank, Catherine. Crusoe, Daniel DeFore. Robert Know, and the Creation of a Myth. Pegasus, 2012.

Green, Martin. The Robinson Crusoe story. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, c1990.

Michals, Teresa. Books for Children, Books for Adults: Age and the Novel from Defoe to James. Cambridge, United Kingdom& New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Pearl, Jason H. Utopian geographies & the early English novel. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014.

Schonhorn, Manuel. Defoe's politics: Parliament, Power, Kingship, and “Robinson Crusoe”. Cambridge [England] & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Watt, Ian. The rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding>. 2nd American ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2001,


Last modified 12 March 2021