Robinson Crusoe has been an international best-seller for three hundred years. This edition of the novel with its introduction, line notes, and full bibliographical notes provides a uniquely scholarly presentation of the novel. There has been no other edition like it.

More than fifty specialists have contributed to this new edition of volume 2 of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. The design of the original work has established itself so firmly as a workable solution to the immense problems of analysis, articulation and coordination that it has been retained in all its essentials for the new edition. The task of the new contributors has been to revise and integrate the lists of 1940 and 1957, to add materials of the following decade, to correct and refine the bibliographical details already available, and to re-shape the whole according to a new series of conventions devised to give greater clarity and consistency to the entries.

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This is the first English edition of a novel that is little known outside Dutch literary circles, but is an interesting example of popular fiction and radical thought about science and society in its day - not only in the Netherlands, but throughout Western Europe. It formed a bridge between the rationalist seventeenth century and the Age of Enlightenment, and was also a lively story in itself. It was rather less than imaginary, moreover, being linked to seventeenth to seventeenth-century Dutch activities in Australia and the first real knowledge about the legendary southern continent. Among the novels based on such exploits, this was one of the most remarkable. The dominance of classics like Defoe's Robinson Crusoe has tended to obscure many such works, but they can be better appreciated today as a result of changing views about literary genres. Defoe, in particular, built on an earlier tradition in which Krinke Kesmes played a vital role. The text is translated from the original edition, and the author's handwritten additions to it are included or discussed in the introduction. A glossary explaining obscure terms and a full bibliography are given along with the introduction, which outlines the background and significance of the work. This is by David Fausett, an authority on early travel fiction and, in particular, that relating to exploration in the austral regions.

In volumes1-8: the final number consists of the Commencement annual.