Restless Classics presents the Three-Hundredth Anniversary Edition of
Robinson Crusoe, the classic Caribbean adventure story and
foundational English novel, with new illustrations by Eko and an
introduction by Jamaica Kincaid that contextualizes the book for our
globalized, postcolonial era.
Three centuries after Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, this
gripping tale of a castaway who spends thirty years on a remote tropical
island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers
before being ultimately rescued, remains a classic of the adventure
genre and is widely considered the first great English novel.
But the book also has much to teach us, in retrospect, about entrenched
attitudes of colonizers toward the colonized that still resound today.
As celebrated Caribbean writer Jamaica Kincaid writes in her bold new
introduction, "The vivid, vibrant, subtle, important role of the tale of
Robinson Crusoe, with his triumph of individual resilience and ingenuity
wrapped up in his European, which is to say white, identity, has played
in the long, uninterrupted literature of European conquest of the rest
of the world must not be dismissed or ignored or silenced."