Restless Classics presents the Three-Hundredth Anniversary Edition of Robinson Crusoe, the classic Caribbean adventure story and foundational English novel, with new illustrations and an introduction by Jamaica Kincaid that contextualizes the book for our globalized, postcolonial era.
When Daniel Defoe published
Robinson Crusoe in 1719, many of the readers who quickly became obsessed with the adventure story were convinced that it was a true-life travelogue written by its protagonist. Three centuries later, the book remains a classic of the adventure genre and is widely considered the first great English novel.
The book also has much to teach us, in retrospect, about the entrenched attitudes of colonizers toward the colonized, and it stands at the beginning of a long tradition of colonial literature and representation that still resounds today. Now with a new introduction by Jamaica Kincaid and vivid illustrations by the Mexican artist Eko, the Restless Classics edition of Robinson Crusoe invites readers to reconsider this tale of a castaway who spends thirty years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being ultimately rescued.
About the Author:
Daniel Defoe (c. 1660-1731) was an English writer, journalist, and spy, who gained enduring fame for his novel, Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest practitioners of the novel and helped popularize the genre in Britain. In some texts he is even referred to as one of the founders, if not the founder, of the English novel. A prolific and versatile writer, he wrote more than five hundred books, pamphlets, and journals on various topics (including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology and the supernatural). He was also a pioneer of economic journalism.
About the Introducer: Jamaica Kincaid is a Caribbean American writer whose essays, stories, and novels are evocative portrayals of family relationships and her native Antigua. Settling in New York City when she left Antigua at age 16, she became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1976. Her books include the short story collection At the Bottom of the River (1983), the novels Annie John (1984) and Lucy (1990), the three-part essay A Small Place (1988), the novel The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) and nonfiction book My Brother (1997). Her "Talk of the Town" columns for The New Yorker were collected in Talk Stories (2001), and in 2005 she published Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya. Her most recent book is the novel See Now Then (2013).
About the Artist: Born in Mexico in 1958,
Eko is a cartoonist, engraver, and painter. His wood etchings, often erotic in nature and the focus of controversial discussion, are part of a broader tradition in Mexican folk art popularized by José Guadalupe Posada. He has collaborated on projects for the
New York Times, the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and the Spanish daily
El País, in addition to having published numerous books in Mexico and Spain. He is the illustrator of three books in the Restless Classics series:
Don Quixote,
Frankenstein, and
Robinson Crusoe.
