Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with His Vision of the Angelick World

MAXIMILLIAN E. NOVAK is Distinguished Research Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published widely on seventeenth-­ and eighteenth­-century literature, has edited a number of volumes in the “Cali­fornia Dryden,” has written five books on Daniel Defoe, and is a general editor of the Stoke Newington Edition of the Writings of Daniel Defoe.IRVING N. ROTHMAN, who passed away in April 2019, was a professor of English at the University of Houston, where he had taught since 1967. He was one of the general editors of the Stoke Newington Edition of the Writings of Daniel Defoe and edited or coedited three volumes, including The Political History of the Devil and two volumes of The Family Instructor.MANUEL SCHONHORN, who passed away in April 2021, was a professor of English emeritus at Southern Illinois University. His books include Defoe’s General History of the Pirates and Defoe’s Politics: Parliament, Power, Kingship and “Robinson Crusoe.” He published articles on Defoe, Pope, Fielding, Sterne, Austen, Twain, and Hemingway, was the recipient of several fellowships and awards, including the Clark Library–UCLA Fellow, Huntington Library Fellow, and Newberry Library–British Academy Exchange Fellow, and was a member of the Columbia University Seminar in Eighteenth­-Century European Culture.

"Robinson Crusoe takes credit in the Preface for the authorship of this third part of the trilogy of The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, but this book is markedly different from the first two volumes. Crusoe rambles through a dozen large questions of social and religious morality which he contends are allegorized in his life. Even the best readers of Defoe can benefit from having a guide through this philosophical labyrinth. Fortunately, the introduction and notes to this superbly edited volume provide the necessary guidance and insight to make the Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe accessible, perhaps for the first time." - Geoffrey Sill (editor of The Works of Daniel Defoe: Satire, Fantasy, and Supernatural Writings) "The editors of Serious Reflections provide useful, contextual, and reasonably tempered reflections of their own on the abundant run of Defoe’s material. Serious Reflections is a kind of topographical survey of the early eighteenth-century mind and this definitive edition charts that survey with a wonderful scholarly and critical agility throughout." - Michael Seidel (author of Exile and the Narrative Imagination) "Robinson Crusoe takes credit in the Preface for the authorship of this third part of the trilogy of The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, but this book is markedly different from the first two volumes. Crusoe rambles through a dozen large questions of social and religious morality which he contends are allegorized in his life. Even the best readers of Defoe can benefit from having a guide through this philosophical labyrinth. Fortunately, the introduction and notes to this superbly edited volume provide the necessary guidance and insight to make the Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe accessible, perhaps for the first time." - Geoffrey Sill (editor of The Works of Daniel Defoe: Satire, Fantasy, and Supernatural Writings) "The editors of Serious Reflections provide useful, contextual, and reasonably tempered reflections of their own on the abundant run of Defoe’s material. Serious Reflections is a kind of topographical survey of the early eighteenth-century mind and this definitive edition charts that survey with a wonderful scholarly and critical agility throughout." - Michael Seidel (author of Exile and the Narrative Imagination)

• ContributorsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionSerious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with his Vision of the Angelick WorldRobinson Crusoe’s PrefacePublisher’s Introduction1 Of SOLITUDE2 An Essay upon HONESTY3 of the Immorality of Conversation, and The Vulgar Errors of Behaviour4 An Essay on the present State of Religion in the World5 Of listning to the Voice of Providence6 Of the Proportion between the Christian and Pagan WorldA Vision of the Angelick WorldBibliographic DescriptionsList of Editorial EmendationsSelected BibliographyAbout the EditorsIndex