Robinson Crusoe, the Novel, and the Formation of Individual Identity and Truth Anonymous College

Robinson Crusoe, written by Daniel Defoe in 1719, is considered by many to be the first English ‘novel’, and offers to literature what Ian Watt describes as ‘a unique demonstration of the connection between individualism in its many forms and the rise of the novel’. Indeed, the notions of autonomy, agency, and self-consciousness as contained in literary characters were, as critic John Richetti proposes, ‘only emerging as new and controversial ideas for European thought at the turn of the seventeenth century’; these changes being best exemplified in the emerging literary spaces of novels like Defoe’s. The eponymous Robinson Crusoe fills every corner of Defoe’s novel, as the reader perceives his physical feelings, thoughts and fancies from every angle, whether retrospectively mediated upon by Crusoe, or experienced through his journal entries. Defoe uses the newly-forged novel space liberally to explore, through Crusoe, more generally the notion of personal identity and a new kind of ‘truth’ through individual perceptions, touching upon the change post-Reformation and rise of national state in the sixteenth century, which, as Watts suggests ‘decisively challenged the substantial social homogeneity of mediaeval Christendom’....