introduccion

The newspaper in which he writes is the News-Letter, with Tory ideology, and Defoe doesn't mind modifying cleverly and lightly the content of the newspaper in favour of the party in the power. His talent for mystification is big and very useful for the political intrigue that dominates in that moment. His journalistic activity is enormous until the first years of the decade of 1720. Starting from these dates Defoe begins to feel a growing interest for detached matters of the political life. The topics that have flooded his writings with trade and industry, politics, religion, the war between France and England and the relative questions to morality and behaviour.
Defoe is fifty five years when he begins to write Robinson Crusoe and with this novel, a period of important novel-writing production opens up in his life. Important with reference to the future. With regard to the present of Defoe not so evidently this way, since the novel as literary gender is even practically nonexistent. Defoe titles his novel The life and strange surprising adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, mariner, although the book is not an adventure just as it is presented in the gender of the picaresque novel, neither it is a book of trips neither a romance neither a devotional book as The Pilgrim's Progress. In fact, it is something new and his author, as Joyce said, "he is the first author that writes without imitating neither adopting foreign works, the first one in creating without literary models" .² For the contemporaries of Defoe, the fact that he wrote fiction and imaginative prose after having dedicated so many years to cultivate considered genders of more dignifier manner, such as the religious discussion, politics, essay and poetry, supposed a considerable social and intellectual decadence. The reasons of this concept have to be seen in connection with the public to which they went destined every one of these genders, and the middle class public that read romances and stories and for which Robinson Crusoe is written.
Most of the critic agrees on accepting that Defoe is based on some real adventures in the writing of Robinson Crusoe. In 1704 the Scottish marine Alexander Selkirk, after a confrontation with William Dampier, captain of the ship in which he navigated, decides to abandon the ship and be alone in the uninhabited island of Juan Fernández.

NOTES:
2- JOYCE,J., Daniel Defoe, Trans. Joseph Prescott, Buffalo State, Universidad de Nueva York, 1964.

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