Visualizing Crusoe

Media Gallery of Robinsonades

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

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, the deserted island, isolation, individualism, adaptation to a harsh environment, and technological mastery. Several of these texts preceded Crusoe's text and offer important intertexts to Crusoe's tale, such as Ibn Tufayl's twelfth-century Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān. 

Many of the narratives above belong to the genre of speculative fiction—and particularly science fiction—which has produced many remediations of Defoe's text. The themes of isolation and survival in these narratives focus on the uninhabited vastness of space and remote planets rather than the desert island central to the 1719 novel. 

The backbone list of this media gallery is sourced from a list of example Robinsonades. I've added some texts that don't appear in this sample (Ibn Tufayl's twelfth-century Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, for example) and have chosen to not include others that don't 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 gallery is by no means complete or fixed, but rather intends to provide a sample of core texts in the Robinsonade genre. 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, and which are critical to the genre and therefore must be included? These questions are one that ultimately falls on the curator or writer, 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. 

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