Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: In the three centuries since Robinson Crusoe, protagonist of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel, first appeared, he has become a global icon of solitude. His twenty-eight-year sojourn on a ‘desert’ island has come to symbolize solitariness at its most extreme; his methods of survival are the stuff of legend. But a closer look at Defoe’s writings on solitude shows that his views of the solitary life were complex and riddled with paradoxes. Why did a man who, as Crusoe, declared he had never been so happy as in solitude, later – also writing as Crusoe – condemn solitude as unnatural?
Source: History Workshop Journal
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/dbaf023
Author: Barbara Taylor
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $4,121
OpenAlex ID: W4414434338
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