Introduction.- Defoe and the Problem of the East India Company.- Between Castaways and Traders: Cannibal-cum-Crusoe in Sumatra and Andaman Islands.- Robinson Crusoe in the Context of Travel Narrative of Early Modern England on Asia.- Robinson Crusoe, Improvement and Intellectual Piracy in the Early Enlightenment.- Religious Conversion and the Far East in the Crusoe Trilogy.- ’Le coeur fou Robinsonne a travers les romans’: Crusoe’s Farther Adventures in the French Robinsonade.- Krusoe Robinson’s Adventure: Technology of the Self and Double Consciousness in Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Robinson der Jungere.- Kicking Away the Gold Coins: Ōtsuka Hisao’s Reading of Robinson Crusoe and the “Human Archetype” of Post-War Japan.- Transforming and Translating the Novel Form: The Examples of Daniel Defoe and Lin Shu.- The Boy and the Sea: Translating Robinson Crusoe in Early Twentieth-Century Korea.- “I must endure courageously and manfully”— Robinson Crusoe Translated by Minami Yōichirō and its Influence on Later Translations in Post-War Japan.- Robinsonades in Japan: Colonial Fantasy, Survivalist Narrative, and Homo Economicus.- Crusoe Comes to Caramoan: The Survival of American Cultural Imperialism in the Philippines.
Steve Clark is Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Letters, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology at the University of Tokyo, Japan. His recent publications include Asian English: Histories, Texts, Institutions, co-edited with Myles Chilton and Yukari Yoshihara.
Yukari Yoshihara is an Associate Professor at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. She is an author and editor of English Studies in Asia (2007) and Asian English: Histories, Texts, Institutions (2021).
This collection of essays expands the study of that immensely widely read and much-adapted novel, beyond the first book – The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (usually known simply as Robinson Crusoe) – to take in the far less well-known Farther Adventures and the almost unread Serious Reflections, beyond Defoe’s texts, to their re-writing and adaptation and beyond the Atlantic and South American context to an Asian and Pacific context. The essays consider both how Asia is represented in the books (in terms of politics, economics, religion), and how the book has been received, adapted, and taught, particularly in Asian contexts.