Global Crusoe travels across the twentieth-century globe, from a Native American reservation to a Botswanan village, to explore the huge variety of contemporary incarnations of Daniel Defoe's intrepid character. In her study of the novels, poems, short stories and films that adapt the Crusoe myth, Ann Marie Fallon argues that the twentieth-century Crusoe is not a lone, struggling survivor, but a cosmopolitan figure who serves as a warning against the dangers of individual isolation and colonial oppression. Fallon uses feminist and postcolonial theory to reexamine Defoe's original novel and several contemporary texts, showing how writers take up the traumatic narratives of Crusoe in response to the intensifying transnational and postcolonial experiences of the second half of the twentieth century. Reading texts by authors such as Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Derek Walcott, Elizabeth Bishop, and J.M. Coetzee within their social, historical and political contexts, Fallon shows how contemporary revisions of the novel reveal the tensions inherent in the transnational project as people and ideas move across borders with frequency, if not necessarily with ease. In the novel Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe's discovery of 'Friday's footprint' fills him with such anxiety that he feels the print like an animal and burrows into his shelter. Likewise, modern readers and writers continue to experience a deep anxiety when confronting the narrative issues at the center of Crusoe's story.

Global Crusoe travels across the twentieth-century globe to explore the huge variety of contemporary incarnations of Daniel Defoe's intrepid character. Reading texts by authors such as Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Derek Walcott and J.M. Coetzee, Fallon argues that the twentieth-century Crusoe is not a lone, struggling survivor, but a cosmopolitan figure who serves as a warning against the dangers of individual isolation and colonial oppression.

Exploring Enlightenment attitudes toward things and their relation to human subjects, this collection offers a geographically wide-ranging perspective on what the eighteenth century looked like beyond British or British-colonial borders. To highlight trends, fashions, and cultural imports of truly global significance, the contributors draw their case studies from Western Europe, Russia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. This survey underscores the multifarious ways in which new theoretical approaches, such as thing theory or material and visual culture studies, revise our understanding of the people and objects that inhabit the phenomenological spaces of the eighteenth century. Rather than focusing on a particular geographical area, or on the global as a juxtaposition of regions with a distinctive cultural footprint, this collection draws attention to the unforeseen relational maps drawn by things in their global peregrinations, celebrating the logic of serendipity that transforms the object into some-thing else when it is placed in a new locale.

Cast away! When young Robinson Crusoe refuted his father’s wishes, choosing to be an adventurer at sea rather than studying Law, little did he realise that life as he knew it, would change forever. Washed up on a deserted island after a violent storm at sea, Robinson is left all alone with the ship’s dog and a few supplies. Will Robinson Crusoe be able to survive on the Island? Were all these years of toil and caution in vain? Who is the savage, Friday? Will he help Crusoe or finish him? Read it all in the fascinating pages of this eternal classic.

This is a book about readers on the move in the age of Victorian empire. It examines the libraries and reading habits of five reading constituencies from the long nineteenth century: shipboard emigrants, Australian convicts, Scottish settlers, polar explorers, and troops in the First World War. What was the role of reading in extreme circumstances? How were new meanings made under strange skies? How was reading connected with mobile communities in an age of expansion? Uncovering a vast range of sources from the period, from diaries, periodicals, and literary culture, Bill Bell reveals some remarkable and unanticipated insights into the way that reading operated within and upon the British Empire for over a century.

The acclaimed historian demonstrates a link between climate change and social unrest across the globe during the mid-17th century. Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides, government collapses—the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were unprecedented in both frequency and severity. The effects of what historians call the "General Crisis" extended from England to Japan and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas. In this meticulously researched volume, historian Geoffrey Parker presents the firsthand testimony of men and women who experienced the many political, economic, and social crises that occurred between 1618 to the late 1680s. He also incorporates the scientific evidence of climate change during this period into the narrative, offering a strikingly new understanding of the General Crisis. Changes in weather patterns, especially longer winters and cooler and wetter summers, disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests. This in turn brought hunger, malnutrition, and disease; and as material conditions worsened, wars, rebellions, and revolutions rocked the world.