We have conflicting opinions about Daniel DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). Megan for some reason finds a book about a dude making lists of every single item he builds, finds, or otherwise encounters on a desert island boring, while Tristan and Katie recognize that as a hallmark of Very Fine Literature (™). There’s lots of good conversation about empire, race, and the novel’s fraught and often quite bad politics. We also discuss Puritans again (we have problems, we know). And goats. SO MANY GOATS.
On the show, we read the Oxford edition edited by Thomas Keymer, with notes by Keymer and James Kelly. For terrific scholarship on what Crusoe’s interactions with animals might tell us about the novel’s political community, see Heather Keenleyside’s Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century.

Find us on Twitter and Instagram @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.