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Featuring a British trader as its hero and set on a distant Caribbean island, Robinson Crusoe cries out for study in its colonial contexts. Indeed, British colonialism informs nearly every feature of Daniel Defoe's first novel. Spatially, Robinson Crusoe illustrates that the vastness of the globe can bring a corresponding enlargement, rather than shrinking, of the venturing self and can produce close self-reflection of a kind not easy to achieve in "civilized" society. Religiously, the novel demonstrates that a spiritual awakening can take place in isolation from society and can be crystallized when an Englishman subordinates and converts a non-European Other. Economically, Defoe's novel functions as an argument for the expansion of trade. And psychologically, Robinson Crusoe shows that relations with an alien Other can hone an ego that can master both its own selfhood and the destiny of others. In short, Robinson Crusoe owes many of its most characteristic traits to the colonial context.
Not surprisingly, contemporary readers commonly regard Defoe's novel as the prototypical colonial novel1 of the eighteenth century, if not in all of English literature. Yet, the colonial elements of Robinson Crusoe have not been as thoroughly treated as we might expect in either eighteenth-century Studies or postcolonial theory and criticism. Curiously, some of the more provocative postcolonial analyses of Defoe's novel appear not in criticism but in postcolonial literature such as Derek Wolcott's Pantomime and J. M. Coetzee's Foe, works that "write back" to Defoe's "master" narrative of empire. Even more numerous are the frequent allusions to Robinson Crusoe, particularly the Crusoe-Friday relationship, in postcolonial theoretical discourse. The mere mention of Defoe's novel, or his protagonist's relationship to Friday, seems to encapsulate the colonial myth and the dynamics of colonial relationships in general. Edward Said, for example, alludes to Robinson Crusoe as "a work whose protagonist is the founder of a new world, which he rules and reclaims for Christianity and England" (70). References like Said's are common, yet there seems to be an odd attempt to avoid engaging the colonial elements of the text in a sustained way. The novel's status as the prototypical colonial novel, I suspect, helps to account for this neglect, seemingly making such analyses unnecessary. Of those studies that engage colonial themes and issues directly...