Novel Didactics? Defoe’s Legacy in the Contemporary Children’s Robinsonade

Abstract

Abstract The contemporary children’s robinsonade exemplifies an amalgamation of several centuries worth of intertexts, visible not only in the texts themselves but also in their audiences. In addition to adapting narrative elements, such as the shipwreck or the encounter with Friday, the narrative intent of didacticism spans over centuries, emulating ideologies of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, or twenty-first-century cultures. By utilising adaptation theory, it is possible to consider the Crusoe story as an interpretively doubled narrative of didacticism and to examine the emergence of the children’s robinsonade through the reception of eighteenth- and twenty-first-century audiences. In comparing the reception of early robinsonades and their narrative structures with the contemporary example of Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, I aim to show the relation between the early reception of Defoe’s work and contemporary adaptations as parts of the didactic legacy of Robinson Crusoe.