Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393964523 ISBN 13: 9780393964523

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993

The Second Edition of the Norton Critical Edition of Robinson Crusoe is based on the Shakespeare Head Press reprint of the first edition copy in the British Museum, with the "errata" listed by Defoe’s publisher, William Taylor, incorporated into the text.

Michael Shinagel has collated the reprint with all six authorized editions published by Taylor in 1719 to achieve a text that is faithful to Defoe's original edition.  Annotations assist the reader with obscure words and idioms, biblical references, and nautical terms.

"Contexts" helps the reader understand the novel’s historical and religious significance.  Included are four contemporary accounts of marooned men, Defoe’s autobiographical passages on the novel’s allegorical foundation, and aspects of the Puritan emblematic tradition essential for understanding the novel’s religious aspects.

"Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century Opinions" is a comprehensive study of early estimations by prominent literary and political figures, including Alexander Pope, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Edgar Allen Poe, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill.

"Twentieth-Century Criticism" is a collection of fourteen essays (five of them new to the Second Edition) that presents a variety of perspectives on Robinson Crusoe by Virginia Woolf, Ian Watt, Eric Berne, Maximillian E. Novak, Frank Budgen, James Joyce, George A. Starr, J. Paul Hunter, James Sutherland, John J. Richetti, Leopold Damrosch, Jr., John Bender, Michael McKeon, and Carol Houlihan Flynn.

A Chronology of Defoe’s life and work and an updated Selected Bibliography are also included.

From the Publisher:

This classic story of a shipwrecked mariner on a deserted island is perhaps the greatest adventure in all of English literature. Fleeing from pirates, Robinson Crusoe is swept ashore in a storm possessing only a knife, a box of tobacco, a pipe-and the will to survive. His is the saga of a man alone: a man who overcomes self-pity and despair to reconstruct his life; who painstakingly teaches himself how to fashion a pot, bake bread, build a canoe; and who, after twenty-four agonizing years of solitude, discovers a human footprint in the sand... Consistently popular since its first publication in 1719, Daniel Defoe's story of human endurance in an exotic, faraway land exerts a timeless appeal. The first important English novel, Robinson Crusoe has taken its rightful place among the great myths of Western civilization.

From the Back Cover:

Thought to have been inspired by the true-life experiences of a marooned sailor, Robinson Crusoe tells the story of the sole survivor of a shipwreck, stranded on a Caribbean island, who prevails against all odds, enduring almost three decades of solitude while mastering both himself and his strange new world. First published in 1719, the novel has long been one of the English language's great adventure stories.
In the journal he shares with us, the endearing, goatskin-clad castaway recounts the details of this lonely existence and his many adventures, including a fierce battle with cannibals and a daring rescue of Friday, the man who becomes his trusted servant and companion. Defoe's brilliant and imaginative use of detail renders Crusoe's island world utterly convincing. In reclaiming his humanity from the savagery of his circumstances, the hero humbly acquires the qualities of courage, patience, ingenuity, and industry.
Hailed as the first great English novel, Robinson Crusoe spawned legions of imitations, none of which surpass the original. All readers with a taste for adventure will relish this inexpensive edition of one of the most popular and influential books ever written.