Robinson Crusoe has attained the status of a myth, a story rediscovered and reinterpreted through successive generations, but it remains a problematic narrative: is it a children's story, a traveller's tale, a religious diary or a myth for adults? The urge to discover an uninhabited island, and to relive a transition from nature to culture, is attested in stories and myths which existed well before Defoe wrote his novel.

Since then, the mythic value of Crusoe has provoked an examination of some of the fundamental problems of existence. But the text is not innocent: the forms of life adopted by Crusoe as a being endowed with language and culture, are ideological reflections of the society he has left. At the same time, the story enacts another dimension at once more intimately personal and more powerfully universal: it is a meditation upon the nature of being and the relationship between self and non-self.

1. This collection of essays explores the Crusoe myth, its origins, its metamorphoses and its subversive reappearances in many different forms and countries.