Visualizing Crusoe

Robinsonade Media Gallery

Robinson Crusoe is deeply embedded in many of our popular culture narratives. Defoe's novel established a literary genre now known as "Robinsonades" that adapt the central premises of the Robinson Crusoe. 

Though these narratives vary widely in their form, content, and plot, many of them remediate core facets of Defoe's text, including the castaway narrative, a deserted island, isolation, individualism, adaptation to a harsh environment, and technological mastery. A few texts that feature these plotlines and narrative elements precede Crusoe's text, informed the novel, and offer important intertextual resonances to Crusoe's tale, such as Ibn Tufayl's twelfth-century Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān. Examining texts that both preceded and followed Robinson Crusoe allows for a more holistic examination of intertexts. 

Many Robinsonades belong to the genre of speculative fiction—particularly science fiction. The themes of isolation and survival in these science fiction narratives focus on the uninhabited vastness of space and remote planets rather than the desert island central to the 1719 novel. As evidenced by the media gallery above, these science fiction tales are particularly prolific during the Cold War period and are informed by the Space Race, which provides a context for framing space as a new isolated frontier that man aims to colonize and gain mastery over, especially in competition with other nations. 

The backbone list of this media gallery is influenced by this list of example Robinsonades. I have adapted this list to include some texts that are critical to the history of Robinson Crusoe and precede its publication, like Ibn Tufayl's twelfth-century Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, for example. I have also added a number of direct Robinson Crusoe adaptations, including the 1902, 1927, 1947, 1954, and 1997 film adaptations of Defoe's novel. I have also eliminated some texts from the list of Robinsonades that do not adhere to the core characteristics of the genre (Panic Room, for example, features isolation in closed quarters, but does not share much in common with the Robinsonade genre).

This media gallery is by no means complete or fixed—the Robinsonade genre contains a dizzying number viable texts—but rather intends to provide a sample of core texts in the Robinsonade genre across media forms to demonstrate how prolifically adapted Defoe's novel has been in pop culture and to provide a visual history of some of these canonical adaptations and remediations. Whether a text can be accurately described as a Robinsonade is also a critical question—which plotlines and environments are necessary to classify a Robinsonade as such, and which divert too much from Defoe's text to be considered a Robinsonade proper? Which facets can fall away as uncritical to the genre, and which are crucial to the genre and therefore must be included? These questions ultimately fall on the curator, writer, and scholar, but are interesting to consider in the context of remediation and adaptation of Robinson Crusoe over time, as well as larger questions about genre and fidelity to an original text. 

Hover over the title of each narrative for more information about a narrative, its author or creator, and image source. 

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