Literature Network » Daniel Defoe

All aboard the ark of possibility; or Robinson Crusoe returns from Mars as a small-footprint, multi-channel indeterminacy machine. (fictional character of English novelist Daniel Defoe)(Making Genre: Studies in the Novel or Something Like It, 1684-1762)

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From: Studies in the Novel
Date: 19980622
Author:Cope, Kevin L.

Since around 1958 the Robinson Crusoe story of Daniel Defoe has been rewritten in various ways for entertainment on the large screen and the smaller one. The book has also been placed by literary historians at the beginning or near the beginning in the rise of the novel. The Defoe body of work, which is vast, brings many interpretations, almost all of which are justified. The work offers a huge, almost infinite, group of possibilities. It is only a starting point, a device for creating alternatives. Defoe writes episodes and was apparently amoral. Ends of stories were just surprising episodes.

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