Robinson Crusoe and its Afterlives

Based on a cooperation with the Robinson-Library at the Kunst(Zeug)Haus in Rapperswil-Jona, I explore the manifold afterlives of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in teaching and research. Together with my students, I am building a website that features the highlights of this archive of over 4’000 historical editions, translations and adaptations of Defoe’s famous novel, which will give the scientific community as well as a broader impact access to this unique resource. I am also working on a monograph tentatively entitled Other Robinsons, that will feature chapters on the entangled cultural-material histories of items in the archive.

Together with Prof. Saugata Bhaduri from Jawaharlal-Nehru-University, Delhi, I am preparing an edition of Jezer Ben Achrach’s The Jewish Robinson (1759), a fascinating re-telling of Defoe’s story from the perspective of an Indian Jew (in truth written by the German author Christoph Gottlieb Richter). Part of the editorial fiction is that this account was published out of Tranquebar, today’s Tharangambadi in Tamil Nadu, India – formerly a Dutch colony through which the printing press made its entrance on the subcontinent with the help of German Jesuit missionaries. We plan to publish the translated text in a critical edition that places this novel in the tradition of Robinsonades, the literary history of globalization as well as the material histories of publishing in eighteenth-century India and Germany.