The document provides background information on the 18th century fiction class being taught. It discusses examples of stories involving cannibals, adventures on unoccupied islands, and women writers in traditional societies. It then summarizes Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe, including plots points and characters such as Crusoe, Friday, and others. Key details are provided on the novel's origins, influences, and themes of faith and survival.

1. Eighteenth Century
Fiction
Instructor
Dr. Mohammad Shaaban, PhD
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, USA
2nd Year Students
Department of English
Faculty of Education
Minia University

2. Starting Questions (1)
 Do you know any examples of the
following stories –
 cannibals
 adventure on an “unoccupied” island;
 women writers in traditional society.
 What skin color do you think Friday
has?

3. Examples of Stories about Cannibals
 Discovery of the natives in the New World since
Renaissance.
 The Tempest – Caliban
 Sindbad from The Thousand and One Nights: the
cannibal giants of the third voyage  Robinson Crusoe
(1719).
 吳鳳  Another Culture, Noble Savage or Barbarian
(Fairy Tales, “The Modest Proposal”, Silence of the Lamb).

4. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
 1719: First volume of
Robinson Crusoe. A hit
with lower and middle
classes.
 Based on the experience of
Alexander Selkirk.
 1722: Moll Flanders. A
novel that draws on his
own experience in
Newgate prison.

5. Crusoe: 1810 edition

6. Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe (1719)
 Novel
 Fictional autobiography of the title
character
 Realistic frame story: exact geographical
coordinates and time account, presenting
“false documents”
 First person narrator

7. Possible literary sources
 Ibn Tufail: Hayy ibn Yaqdhan (early Arabic
literature)
 Robert Knox: An Historical Account of the
Island Ceylon” (1681) – Knox’s story about
his abduction by the King of Ceylon in 1659
 http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/iss/library/specc
oll/bomarch/bommarch04.html
 Woodes Rogers: Cruising Voyage Round the
World (1712) – Selkirk story

8. THE ADVENTURES OF
ROBINSON CRUSOE: style & influences
 Puritan spiritual autobiography;
 A celebration of hard work and faith (G 169).
 E.g. his calculation: "twenty-eight years, two
months, and nineteen days.“
 By 1895 – 115 revisions, 277 imitations, 110
translations, 196 English editions. (Atwell 133)

9. Plot summary
 From Hull to London (1651)
 From London to Africa (captivity and escape)
 Friends with the captain of a Portuguese ship
 From Africa to Brazil (plantation)
 From Brazil to Africa (to import slaves)
 Shipwrecked (1659) – island (for 28 years)
 Discovers the island, builds his two homes
 Native cannibals
 Friday
 Another cannibal feast – battle between Crusoe, Friday & the cannibals --» Friday’s father
and a Spaniard is freed
 English ship (deal between the captain & Crusoe) – rebels remain on the island + later
Spaniards
 1686 – leaves the island
 1687 – back to England
 His plantation in Brazil grants him wealth
 He marries
 1694 – visits the island again (his new colony)

10. Character List
Crusoe
 a self-centered, self-
absorbed individual
 after two decades
alone Crusoe discovers
and rescues Man Friday.
"I stood like one Thunder-struck, or as
if I had seen an
Apparition...“ (Chapter XVII)

11. Character List
 Robinson Crusoe - The novel's protagonist and
narrator. Crusoe begins the novel as a young
middle-class man in York in search of a career.
He father recommends the law, but Crusoe
yearns for a life at sea, and his subsequent
rebellion and decision to become a merchant is
the starting point for the whole adventure that
follows. His vague but recurring feelings of guilt
over his disobedience color the first part of the
first half of the story and show us how deep
Crusoe's religious fear is. Crusoe is steady and
plodding in everything he does, and his
perseverance ensures his survival through
storms, enslavement, and a twenty-eight-year
isolation on a desert island.

12.  Friday - A twenty-six-year-old Caribbean native
and cannibal who converts to Protestantism
under Crusoe's tutelage. Friday becomes Crusoe's
servant after Crusoe saves his life when Friday is
about to be eaten by other cannibals. Friday
never appears to resist or resent his new
servitude, and he may sincerely view it as
appropriate compensation for having his life
saved. But whatever Friday's response may be,
his servitude has become a symbol of imperialist
oppression throughout the modern world.
Friday's overall charisma works against the
emotional deadness that many readers find in
Crusoe.

13.  The Portuguese captain - The sea captain who picks up
Crusoe and the slave boy Xury from their boat after they
escape from their Moorish captors and float down the
African coast. The Portuguese captain takes Crusoe to
Brazil and thus inaugurates Crusoe's new life as plantation
owner. The Portuguese captain is never named—unlike
Xury, for example—and his anonymity suggests a certain
uninteresting blandness in his role in the novel. He is polite,
personable, and extremely generous to Crusoe, buying the
animal skins and the slave boy from Crusoe at well over
market value. He is loyal as well, taking care of Crusoe's
Brazilian investments even after a twenty-eight-year
absence. His role in Crusoe's life is crucial, since he both
arranges for Crusoe's new career as a plantation owner and
helps Crusoe cash in on the profits later.

14.  The Spaniard - One of the men from the
Spanish ship that is wrecked off Crusoe's island,
and whose crew is rescued by the cannibals and
taken to a neighboring island. The Spaniard is
doomed to be eaten as a ritual victim of the
cannibals when Crusoe saves him. In exchange,
he becomes a new “subject” in Crusoe's
“kingdom,” at least according to Crusoe. The
Spaniard is never fleshed out much as a
character in Crusoe's narrative, an example of
the odd impersonal attitude often notable in
Crusoe.


15.  Xury - A nonwhite (Arab or black) slave boy
only briefly introduced during the period of
Crusoe's enslavement in Sallee. When Crusoe
escapes with two other slaves in a boat, he forces
one to swim to shore but keeps Xury on board,
showing a certain trust toward the boy. Xury
never betrays that trust. Nevertheless, when the
Portuguese captain eventually picks them up,
Crusoe sells Xury to the captain. Xury's sale
shows us the racist double standards sometimes
apparent in Crusoe's behavior.


16.  The widow - Appearing briefly, but on
two separate occasions in the novel, the
widow keeps Crusoe's 200 pounds safe in
England throughout all his thirty-five
years of journeying. She returns it loyally
to Crusoe upon his return to England and,
like the Portuguese captain and Friday,
reminds us of the goodwill and
trustworthiness of which humans can be
capable, whether European or not.

17. Robinson Crusoe
Sections 1-3
I Go to Sea
I am Captured by Pirates
I Escape from the Sallie River

18. Summary
 Crusoe explains he was born in 1632 and was the third son
to a middle class family. He claims to have always wanted
to be a sailor and escape England, but his father did not
approve.
 The tale begins in Hull and London, but he does not
mention friends or relatives.
 His first time at sea in 1651, the ship almost sinks due to a
bad storm, and he is turned off of sailing.
 Yet he continues to sail, going on two trade voyages, but
he is captured by pirates and they make him fish for them.
 One day while fishing with two other slaves, Ismael and
Xury, Crusoe pushes Ismael into the water and he and Xury
escape. They are eventually picked up by a kind Portuguese
captain who buys Crusoe’s ship and Xury and promises to
take Crusoe to Brazil.

19. Character information
 Stubborn: “I consulted mother and father
any more, nor so much as sent them word
of it [sailing away…], without asking God’s
blessing, or my father’s (31).
 Impulsive: “I entirely forgot the vows and
promises I made in my distress” (33).
 Believes in fate: “Certainly nothing but
some such decreed unavoidable misery
attending which it was impossible for me
to escape” (37).

20. Character information continued
 Patient or coward?: “for two years, tho’ I
often pleased myself with the imagination,
yet I never had the least encouraging
prospect of putting it into practice” (42).
 Ruthless or not?: “If you come near the
boat I’ll shoot you thro’ the head; for I am
resolved to have my liberty” (45).
Superior attitude: “’Xury,’ says I, ‘you
shall go on shoar and kill him’” (49).

21. Settings
 Hull-Safe and boring: “My father’s house
and my native country…and had a
prospect of raising my fortune by
application and industry, with a life of
ease and pleasure” (27-28).
 At sea-exciting and new: “We dropped our
little anchor and lay still all night…for in
two or three hours we saw vast great
creatures of many sorts, come down to
the sea-shoar and run into the water”
(46).

22. Narrator
 Defoe takes on the first person persona of
Crusoe: “I was born in the year 1632, in the city
of York” (27).
 Speaks to us as if we are his close friends.
 Very practical, detail, and fact oriented but less
open with his feelings.
 His focus on facts, actions, and details helps
mark the beginning of the novelistic form in
English literature.
 Flashback: “This was the only voyage which I
may say was successful in all my adventures”
(40).

23. Style/Genre
 Adventure story about storms and pirates,
but also an exemplary tale: a tale told for
purposes of moral and religious
instruction.
 Also fits into the “castaway” genre.

24. Imagery
 “Taste: “I was most inexpressibly sick in body
and terrify’d in my mind” (31).
 Touch: “Thrusting me aside with his foot, let me
lye, thinking I had been dead” (35).
 Smell: They “were for eating the flesh of this
creature [leopard]…immediately they fell to
work…took off his skin readily” (52).
 Sight: “I perceived the creature within two oars’
length, which something surprized me” (46)
 Sound: “The wind blew too fresh…[it] blew very
hard” (33).

25. Figures of Speech
 Personification: “We saw her sink, and
then I saw for the first time what was
meant by a ship foundering at sea” (36).
 Similie: “He swam like a cork” (44).
 Irony: “We should be devoured by savage
beasts, or more merciless savages of
human kind?” (45).
 Dialect: “’Me kill! He eat me at one
mouth’” (49).

26. Symbols
 Sea: “There seemed to be something fatal
in that propension of nature tending
directly to the life of misery which was to
befal me” (28).
 Crusoe: human ambition, restlessness and
rebellion. “in a few weeks after, I resolved
to run quite away from him” (30).
 England/city: class system. “the calamities
of life were shared among the upper and
lower part of mankind; but that the middle
station had the fewest disasters” (28).

27. Themes
 Local vs. Foreigner: Despite the story's
beginning in Hull and London, Crusoe does not
focus much attention on any Englishmen, and he
seems destined by nature to explore the world.
 Independence: Crusoe pulls away from his family
at the age of 18.
 Self-reliance: Crusoe embodies the concept that
we are truly all alone in the world and must be
able to take care of herself.
 Superiority vs. Humanity: Crusoe seems to treat
slaves kindly, but he still feels superior to people
of other races and nations.

28. Questions
 Do you think Crusoe a good person? Why
or why not?
 If you were in his shoes, would you have
went on the second voyage?
 Have you ever felt the pull to escape?
Would you ever want to live in a foreign
land?
 What could also be considered a symbol in
this section?
 Make a prediction for Crusoe’s future.

29. I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a
good Family, tho not of that Country, my Father being
a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull: He got
a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his
Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had
married my Mother, whose Relations were named
Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and
from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by
the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now
called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name

30. Let us Read the Story and
Find out more in details