Robinson Crusoe (Barnes & Noble Classics) [Paperback]

Daniel Defoe (Author), L. J. Swingle (Introduction)

Book Description

Age Level: 9 and up | Grade Level: 4 and up

Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

 

Widely regarded as the first English novel, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is one of the most popular and influential adventure stories of all time. This classic tale of shipwreck and survival on an uninhabited island was an instant success when first published in 1719 and has inspired countless imitations.

In his own words, Robinson Crusoe tells of the terrible storm that drowned all his shipmates and left him marooned on a deserted island. Forced to overcome despair, doubt, and self-pity, he struggles to create a life for himself in the wilderness. From practically nothing, Crusoe painstakingly learns how to make pottery, grow crops, domesticate livestock, and build a house. His many adventures are recounted in vivid detail, including a fierce battle with cannibals and his rescue of Friday, the man who becomes his trusted companion.

Full of enchanting detail and daring heroics, Robinson Crusoe is a celebration of courage, patience, ingenuity, and hard work.

L. J. Swingle is Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of Kentucky, where his primary field of study is the intellectual contexts of British Romanticism as reflected in the works of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets and novelists.

Editorial Reviews

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From L. J. Swingle's Introduction to Robinson Crusoe

People who have never actually read Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe often think of it as a children's book. It is a tale, so they suppose, that belongs on the shelf upstairs in the playroom alongside Lassie, the Hardy Boys books, and Charlotte's Web. But to discover the fallacy of this notion we need only sit down with a child and start trying to read the book. Reading Robinson Crusoe to a child usually turns out to be a different, somewhat less amiable adventure than telling the child about Robinson Crusoe in our own words. The child can eagerly attend to our retelling of the Crusoe story, relatively inept storytellers though we may be. The experiences of a man shipwrecked alone on a desert island-his initial fears, his efforts to escape, his struggle to secure food and shelter, his discovery of a footprint in the sand-all these things take powerful hold on a child's imagination. But if plunged into Defoe's original narrative of Crusoe's experiences, a child immediately senses that the waters of storytelling have suddenly gotten uncomfortably deep, that the exciting shallows of the story as Mom or Dad would tell it at bedtime have been left behind, that many things going on around the margins of the adventure story in Defoe's book are not attractively adventurous. How can a person possibly wade through this strange book that pretends to be Robinson Crusoe? Some sort of incomprehensible adult trickery must be going on here.

Published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe is a novel for grown-up minds that has been kidnapped for, though obviously not by, the kids. In this respect it's interestingly akin to another supposed children's book that would be published midway into the next century, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Like Crusoe, Alice presents us with the story of a person transported from our own familiar world into foreign territory that offers opportunity for exciting adventure, obviously, but also for an encounter with some complex intellectual issues. A child, responding eagerly to the adventure but brought up short by the intellectual issues, is likely to sense immediately that neither Crusoe nor Alice is a book for the playroom. Both belong in the library downstairs, where adults retreat to contemplate the shadowy mysteries of their own minds and experience.

Once we adults rescue Robinson Crusoe from the playroom and begin thinking about its significance for ourselves, it is helpful to consider some things we might expect to find in the novel that either do not appear there at all or that appear in unfamiliar forms. Writing Robinson Crusoe in the early years of the eighteenth century, Defoe reveals himself to be in several important respects not quite of our mind. True, he's an intellectual precursor of the modern mind and, as such, some aspects of his basic interests and values are relatively close to our own. Rudiments of the Crusoe story exert considerable contemporary popular appeal, and not just to small children. Many movie adaptations have been made of the story. In the last few years alone, for example, we've had Aidan Quinn play Crusoe in a 1988 film of that name; we've had Pierce Brosnan, of James Bond fame, play Crusoe in the 1996 Robinson Crusoe; we've had Tom Hanks play a rather interesting loose translation of Crusoe as a plane-wrecked Federal Express man in the 2000 film Cast Away. The name "Robinson Crusoe" itself has entered the public domain; like "Gatsby," "Tarzan," "Superman," and "Mickey Mouse," it has become a useful shorthand term in contemporary popular thought, meaningful to people who have never encountered the literary source.

But if we go back to the novel Robinson Crusoe and see what Defoe made of the story in 1719, we run into some intriguing basic differences from common inclinations of thought in more recent centuries. These differences constitute an important part of what makes Robinson Crusoe not simply entertaining-occasionally almost more puzzling, or even more irritating than entertaining-but thereby greatly worth reading for the mind's sake.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 9 and up
  
• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics (March 3, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593083602
• ISBN-13: 978-1593083601
• Product Dimensions: 0.8 x 5 x 7.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #176,891 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Back to the Source, June 27, 2010

By 

Roger Brunyate "reader/writer/musician" (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Robinson Crusoe (Barnes & Noble Classics) (Paperback)

Who and what are we, as human beings? What qualities are innate to us, and which have been layered upon us by culture and convention? This is one of several profound questions posed by Defoe's great novel of 1719 which, so far from being a simple adventure story for children, was to become one of the seminal documents of 18th-century thought. I read it in abridged form as a child, and more seriously in college, but it meant little to me then. Recently, however, I have been reading a lot of Australian literature -- let me cite Patrick White's VOSS as a prime example -- that explores aspects of a similar theme: man reduced to his most basic essence, and his relationship to a culture abandoned at home and needing to be rebuilt from scratch abroad. What better than to go back to the grandfather of all such writing, ROBINSON CRUSOE?

While I haven't compared other editions, this one from Barnes & Noble is certainly pleasant and convenient. It has an attractive NC Wyeth illustration on the cover, it is clearly printed, easy to hold in the hand, and contains a modest amount of footnotes glossing words which are unfamiliar or have changed their meaning. It also includes an excellent introduction by LJ Swingle that puts the main themes into context. Reading it as an afterword, I found that Swingle had already expressed most of my own reactions to the book, much more eloquently than I could do myself.

A few of these nonetheless. I was surprised by the pacing of the book. For a start, Crusoe has several adventures before he reaches the island, including suffering shipwreck off the east coast of England on his very first journey by sea, being captured as a slave by North African pirates, and setting up a plantation in Brazil employing his own indentured laborers. Indeed, he is on a voyage back to Africa to buy slaves when the famous shipwreck occurs. While Defoe might have used this for a polemic against slavery, he doesn't; indeed on his return to civilization, Crusoe finds himself enriched by the profits of three decades of slave labor on his plantation. Nonetheless, this does set up a strong contrast with the state Crusoe finds himself in when he has to make and do everything for himself. Yet here too I was surprised; so far from coming to the island empty-handed, Crusoe manages to salvage an enormous amount from the wrecked ship; he had enough gunpowder, for instance, to last for almost thirty years.

It was also fascinating to watch religion taking root in that barren soil. Crusoe is presented at first as no more than a conventionally religious man, and he curses Providence for thrusting him into such calamity. But gradually he begins to find religion a necessity to enable him to understand and appreciate his new life -- at one point literally counting his blessings. So that by the time he becomes aware that the island is occasionally visited by cannibals, it is his religious philosophy that guides him on how to treat them. Defoe's outlook is frankly Christian, as opposed to the Naturism of Rousseau, whose EMILE praises CRUSOE as indispensable, or the rationality of Voltaire, whose CANDIDE is a satirical attack on the very notion of a benevolent Providence.

I was interested that the cannibal sequence, starting with the famous footprint in the sand, begins beyond the halfway point in the book, and in the last two or three years of Crusoe's stay on the island. It takes Crusoe a quarter-century to learn to live alone; only then does Defoe bring social aspects back into play, by distinct stages but in an accelerating rhythm. First, he is forced to think defensively, surrounded by potential enemies. Next he must engage those enemies, rescuing one of their victims, his man Friday. Then there is a period of living together, as master and servant, teacher and pupil. Then the number of subjects in his little kingdom increases to three. Finally, he is involved in putting down the mutiny on an English ship, becoming commando leader, judge, and admiral. There is one delicious moment when he represents himself, not as the Governor of the island, but as somebody speaking for the Governor, who remains in his fastness unseen. A WIZARD OF OZ situation, perhaps, but also one in which Crusoe becomes a kind of god. It was interesting to see the tropes of civilization rushing in over the final pages, like water through a breach. But at the same time, I found it a little sad, and yearned for a return to that pristine Eden.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very useful edition, September 3, 2009

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Richard B. Schwartz (Columbia, Missouri USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Robinson Crusoe (Barnes & Noble Classics) (Paperback)

Robinson Crusoe is available in multiple editions. This is a useful one. The text is complete; the introduction is intelligent; the notes are good. There are reaction quotes from such figures as Coleridge, Rousseau and Marx. Most of all, the text is readable and the edition is inexpensive. I have used it in class for several years now and the cover and pages remain intact. Of the editions available, for the price, this is one of the very best.

1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Picture of the average joe, December 23, 2006

By 

Jesse Garner (Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Robinson Crusoe (Barnes & Noble Classics) (Paperback)

There is a certain humanistic view running through Crusoe, tempered somewhat by talk of God, but still this undercurrent of an idea that if you put your mind to it and try hard enough you can make anything. Anyone, with enough work, can make pottery, cheese, or a boat to take you around the island. All it takes is time and effort - with enough time and effort even an unremarkable man from the middle station of life can survive "easy" on a deserted island! This idea runs in tension with the religious conversion of Crusoe and his talk about about the Providence of God.

Though not an easy read - Defoe tends to write paragraph-long sentences liberally sprinkled with semicolons and commas - it will be rewarding if the reader can look into some of the issues that Defoe is dealing with, such as the effect of the environment on man, the role of religion in man's existence, life direction and motivation, and the how social class affects happiness. Be warned that Defoe, in the spirit of his time, treats non-European races as inferior and unintelligent, principles that can be difficult to read through at times without an emotional response.