Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade Across Languages, Cultures, and Media ed. by Jakub Lipski, and: Robinson Crusoe after 300 Years ed. by Andreas K. E. Mueller and Glynis Ridley

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade Across Languages, Cultures, and Media ed. by Jakub Lipski, and: Robinson Crusoe after 300 Years ed. by Andreas K. E. Mueller and Glynis Ridley Andrew O'Malley Jakub Lipski, ed., Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade Across Languages, Cultures, and Media (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 212. $34.95 paper, $120.00 cloth. Andreas K. E. Mueller and Glynis Ridley, eds., Robinson Crusoe after 300 Years (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press) 2021. Pp. 234; 22 b/w and 7 color illus. $42.50 paper, $150.00 cloth. 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 [End Page 313] 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), J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986), and Yann Martel's Life of Pi (2001) using the philosophical thought experiment of the "counterfactual" to explore the poetics of the genre. Chapters in the second section, "National Contexts," turn to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century expansion of the Robinsonade into other European national literatures. Przemysław Uściński, in his nuanced study of The Female American (1767), attempts to complicate the colonial legacy of the Robinsonade by invoking Homi Bhabha's idea of a "third space" that troubles "the fixity of any cultural identity" (50). Employing, unusually for an eighteenth-century Robinsonade, a "biracial female missionary as proxy for colonialist power," The Female American raises but ultimately sidesteps "historically urgent questions about justice, agency, and accountability" (50). Editor Jakub Lipski provides a fascinating account of Robinson Crusoe's reception and its role in the rise to prominence of the novel in the literary culture of eighteenth-century Poland. While I was aware that Robinson Crusoe was translated fairly quickly into many European languages (and eventually into virtually every written language, even Esperanto), Lipski's intriguing history of how both its Polish translation and Ignacy Krasicki's Defoeinspired The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom helped change national literary tastes was a revelation to me. The remaining two chapters...