Published in 1719 and sometimes regarded as the first novel in English. A fictional autobiography of an English castaway who spends 28 years on a remote island, encountering savages, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. Novelist James Joyce said: "He is the true prototype of the British colonist... The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity". |