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The 2019 tricentenary of the publication of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (and of its sequel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe) has understandably seen renewed interest in Defoe's most famous literary creation. As has often been noted, it is hard to overstate the extent of Robinson Crusoe's cultural impact; so embedded in the popular psyche are aspects of the story that the image of a person on a desert island, or of a footprint in the sand, universally evokes it. Two recent volumes of essays from Bucknell University Press offer convincing reminders of Crusoe's remarkable, transmedial legacy and continued cultural relevance.
Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade Across Languages, Cultures, and Media, edited by Jakub Lipski, concerns itself primarily, as the title suggests, with the protean genre to which Defoe's novel quickly gave rise: "Our main concern here then is studying the Robinsonade as a genre in a constant state of becoming, transcending, as it were, any formal restrictions one might impose on it" (1). Examples of this genre began appearing within a few years of Robinson Crusoe's initial publication; the term itself was coined by the German author, Johann Gottfried Schnabel, to describe his own island shipwreck narrative, Die Insel Felsenburg (1731). Since that time, the island castaway narrative has been adapted to virtually every imaginable category of reader, and has migrated across an incredibly wide range of media: theatrical productions, film, comic books, toys, games, and innumerable commercial enterprises and consumer goods. The collection's first of four sections, "Exploring and Transcending the Genre," appropriately offers two very strong essays that bookend the literary Robinsonade's history to date. Rivka Swenson's chapter looks back to one of the earliest and most successful examples of the genre, Peter Longueville's The Hermit (1727), and is followed by Patrick Gill's study of recent postmodern examples. Swenson's revisiting of Longueville's entertaining, imaginative but understudied novel persuasively considers its repeatedly referenced eating, food preparation, and pickling—"the act of preserving and transforming" (12)—as a metaphor for narrative world-building practices in the period's fiction. Noting insightfully that Robinson Crusoe serves as "the perfect sandbox setting" (24), offering endless narrative possibilities, Gill's study considers the original novel with Muriel Spark's Robinson (1958),...