THE EDITOR
MICHAEL SHINAGEL received his Ph.D. from Harvard
University, where he is Senior Lecturer on English and Dean of Continuing
Education and University Extension. He has also taught at Cornell University
and Union College. He is the author of Daniel Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility,
editor of A Concordance to the Poems of Jonathan Swift, and co-editor of
Harvard Scholars in English, 1890-1990. His articles and reviews have appeared
in various scholarly journals.
Daniel Defoe
ROBINSON CRUSOE
Second Edition
Edited by Michael Shinagel, Harvard University
The Second Edition of the Norton Critical Edition
of Robinson Crusoe is based on the Shakespeare Head Press reprint of the
first edition copy in the British Museum, with the "errata" listed by Defoe’s
publisher, William Taylor, incorporated into the text.
Michael Shinagel has collated the reprint with
all six authorized editions published by Taylor in 1719 to achieve a text
that is faithful to Defoe’s original edition. Annotations assist the reader
with obscure words and idioms, biblical references, and nautical terms.
"Contexts" helps the reader understand the novel’s historical and religious significance. Included are four contemporary accounts of marooned men, Defoe’s autobiographical passages on the novel’s allegorical foundation, and aspects of the Puritan emblematic tradition essential for understanding the novel’s religious aspects.
"Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Opinions" is a comprehensive study of early estimations by prominent literary and political figures, including Alexander Pope, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Edgar Allen Poe, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill.
"Twentieth-Century Criticism" is a collection of fourteen essays (five of them new to the Second Edition) that presents a variety of perspectives on Robinson Crusoe by Virginia Woolf, Ian Watt, Eric Berne, Maximillian E. Novak, Frank Budgen, James Joyce, George A. Starr, J. Paul Hunter, James Sutherland, John J. Richetti, Leopold Damrosch, Jr., John Bender, Michael McKeon, and Carol Houlihan Flynn.
A Chronology of Defoe’s life and work and an updated Selected Bibliography are also included.
436 pages / 1994 / ISBN 0-393-96452-3