So, it's clear that Defoe was a leading edge literary figure, and a political dynamo.
In addition, he's regarded as a pioneering "feminist" writer for his portrayal of heroines Moll Flanders and Roxana. No less than the darling of academic feminism, Virginia Woolf, praised him vociferously:
On any monument worthy of the name of monument the names of Moll Flanders and Roxanna, at least, should be carved as deeply as the name of Defoe. They stand among the few English novels that we can call indisputably great.
So, even if Crusoe ends up, in a revaluation, falling short of real "rugged individualism", Defoe himself, a complex character in a complex time, lived up to his own hype.
Crusoe and his Consequences is a short, engaging read that is full of all kinds of interesting details of Daniel Defoe's life and times, and how they become the background of Robinson Crusoe's odyssey. There are also tantalizing streams of information that you sometimes do double-takes over, such as when Dunkerley relates that "as Warden of the Mint, Isaac Newton ordered at least a dozen executions of clippers and counterfeiters following the recoinage of 1696". Oy, what a fig that Newton was!
Again, there have been so many versions of Robinson Crusoe produced over the last three centuries that it has sprouted its own literary genre: Robinsonade. From children's retellings in Europe and America, to novels, poems, video games, films and TV series based on Crusoe or its themes (Luis Bunuel's Crusoe, Tom Hanks' Castaway, Andy Weir's The Martian, and even Gilligan's Island), they all enact aspects of concern a castaway faces in his or her new-found self-isolation. Among the Robinsonade concerns are: progress through technology; the rebuilding of civilization; economic achievement; hostile nature. Some of these are contemporary concerns as well. We are currently facing hostile nature (and, maybe soon enough, civilization will need rebuilding).
Dunkerley suggests that in our re-reading of Crusoe we put away the Little Boy/Little Girl glasses we were handed in class as kids, and read the parable, as literate adults, with new eyes, for the first time. Maybe you'll still see it the same old way, or maybe you'll go the way of the comical master-slave dialectical movie version, Man Friday, and hope it ends differently for the colonial slaver.
Crusoe 300: The Myth of the Rugged Individualist
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