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The Second Edition of the Norton Critical Edition of Robinson Crusoe is based on the Shakespeare Head Press reprint of the first edition copy in the British Museum, with the "errata" listed by Defoeís publisher, William Taylor, incorporated into the text.

Michael Shinagel has collated the reprint with all six authorized editions published by Taylor in 1719 to achieve a text that is faithful to Defoeís original edition. Annotations assist the reader with obscure words and idioms, biblical references, and nautical terms.

Contexts helps the reader understand the novelís historical and religious significance. Included are four contemporary accounts of marooned men, Defoeís autobiographical passages on the novelís allegorical foundation, and aspects of the Puritan emblematic tradition essential for understanding the novelís religious aspects.

Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Opinions is a comprehensive study of early estimations by prominent literary and political figures, including Alexander Pope, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Edgar Allen Poe, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill.

Twentieth-Century Criticism is a collection of fourteen essays (five of them new to the Second Edition) that presents a variety of perspectives on Robinson Crusoe by Virginia Woolf, Ian Watt, Eric Berne, Maximillian E. Novak, Frank Budgen, James Joyce, George A. Starr, J. Paul Hunter, James Sutherland, John J. Richetti, Leopold Damrosch, Jr., John Bender, Michael McKeon, and Carol Houlihan Flynn.

A Chronology of Defoeís life and work and an updated Selected Bibliography are also included.