Daniel Defoe 丹尼尔·笛福

"The eighteenth century was the golden age of the (English) novel. The novel of this period … spoke the truth about life with an uncompromising courage." The novelists of this period understood that "the job of a novelist was to tell the truth about life as he saw it." This explains the achievement of the English novel in the 18th century.
The significance of Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe is one of the protagonists drawn most successfully in English novels. Through his characterization of Crusoe, Defoe depicts him as a hero struggling against nature and human fate with his indomitable 不屈不挠的will, and eulogizes creative labor, physical and mental, an allusion to the glorification of the bourgeois creativity when it was a rising and more energetic class in the initial stage of its historical development. Form an individual laborer to a master and colonizer, Crusoe seems to have gone through various stages of human civilization.

Characteristic of the style and language: simple language, concise description, and well-knit plot construction.
Critics views on Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe and Utopian Thought of the West 《鲁滨逊漂流记》与西方乌托邦思想 牛红英

Robinson Crusoe 1719.鲁滨逊漂流记 Captain Singleton (1720) 辛格顿船长 Moll Flanders (1722),墨尔 弗兰德斯 Colonel Jack (1722)杰克上校 Roxana (1724).罗克萨娜 The last four novels show his deep sympathy for the poor and down-trodden people.

Friday: a friend/servant of Crusoe’s, he spends a number of years on the island with the main character, who saves him from cannibalistic death. Friday is basically Crusoe’s protege [ˈprəuti ʒei] （被保护者）, a living example of religious justification of the slavery relationship between the two ld-famous novel "Gulliver's Travels" drew ruthless pictures of the depraved aristocracy and satirically portrayed the whole of the English state system.
Daniel Defoe
(1660-1731) The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished, or the luster光 泽 of it will never appear.
A Brief Introduction to Daniel Defoe
The Works of Daniel Defoe



The Trueborn Englishman (1701),真正的英国 人His best-known pamphlet which exposes the aristocracy and the tyranny of the church. The Shortest Way with the Dissenters 消灭不 同教派的捷径(1702) satarizes the English High Church’s 英国国教suppression of Dissenters at all cost. The Review评论– a political and literary magazine started by Defoe



The image of Robinson Crusoe 1. One of the representative of the rising bourgeoisie 2. An enterprising Englishman 3. A laborer, a hard-working industrious and intelligent man. 4. A typical colonizer, explorer, and a foreign trader. He is alert, vigorous and resourceful

English novelist, pamphleteer, and journalist, author of Robinson Crusoe (1719), a story of a man shipwrecked alone on an island. Defoe is considered the founder of the English novel.

Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" was one of the forerunners of the English realistic novel. It creates the image of an enterprising Englishman, typical of the English bourgeoisie of the 18th century. The development of the English novel was continued by Richardson who wrote his first novel "Pamela" by accident. It was followed by two other long works, "Clarissa" and "Sir Charles Grandison".
Robinson Crusoe

Background on the novel: In 1704, Alexander Selkirk亚历山大 赛尔柯克, a Scottish sailor, was marooned on the island of Juan Fernandez in the Atlantic,

Fielding's novels unfold a panorama of life in all sections of English society. Fielding was the real founder of the realistic novel in England. Another 18th century novelist of the realistic school was Smollett, the author of "Roderick Random". The new element of sentiment or sensibility was added to the novel by Sterne whose "Tristram Shandy" was the strangest novel in English Literature.
The Rise of the English Novel:

The modern European novel began after the Renaissance, with Cervantes's "Don Quixote" (1605-1615). The modern English novel began two centuries later, in the 18th century. The rise and growth of the realistic novel is the most prominent achievement of 18th century English literature, which has given the world such novelists as Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne.
Defoe’s Reputation
Defoe was one of the first to write stories about believable characters in realistic situations using simple prose. Along with Samuel Richardson, Defoe is considered the founder of the English novel. Before his time stories were usually written as long poems or dramas.
The major topic the author explores in the novel are:


1. The labor, the creativity of bourgeoisie 2. Anglo-centrism—Negro slave on his plantation in Brazil 3. Slavery and the establishment of colony 4. Great desire for making wealth abroad (British dream)

The supreme quality of his novels lies in the sense of reality and the lifelikeness of the characters, which are achieved by the insistence （坚持）on detail. Note also that Defoe used the ordinary language of the ordinary people-easy, free, and very plain.

Robinson Crusoe is closely related to the utopian thought of the West. However, the significance of this fiction has seldom been mentioned or studied as an important link in the histories of Western utopian thought and utopian literature. As a classic combination of extraordinary voyage and the utopian thought of the West, Robinson Crusoe portrays a hero who does not visit or imagine, but builds a utopia with his own hands. In this sense Robinson Crusoe not only inherits much from but also develops to a gre...