Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel following Robinson Crusoe's 28-year survival on a deserted island after a shipwreck — the first English novel — which served as Rousseau's model for Emile's natural education and as the founding myth of Enlightenment individualism and colonial enterprise.
Creates the myth of the self-sufficient individual who reconstructs civilization from scratch — which Rousseau used as the model for natural education and Marxist critics identified as the founding myth of bourgeois individualism — making Robinson Crusoe the most ideologically productive novel in English literary history.
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