Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

• Published in 1719
• I look back on my desolate island as the most pleasant place in the world
• These people were not murtherers… any more than those Christians were murtherers who often put to death, the prisoners taken in Battle.
• inhuman hellish Brutality and the Horror of the degeneracy of human nature
• cannibals or men-eaters and fail not to murther and devour all the humane Bodies that fall into their hands.
• "Horrid spectacle” and “my stomach grew sich"
• “THey do not know it be an offence"
• I was remov’d from all the wickedness of the world here
• I had enough to eat and to supply my wants and what was all the rest to me?
• I frequently sat down to my meat with thankfullness and admired the hand of God’s providence, which had thus spread my table in the wilderness
• No need for "Gold" or "silver"
• What if he should have lived “like a meer savage” and "gnaw at it with my teeth and pull it with my claws like a beast"
• It is not just the cannibalism of the “savage’s” eating habits, but the excessiveness of it
• Alex Mackintosh, 2011


  "the question of who (or what) may eat what (or whom) is shown to be inseparable from the broader questions raised by the novel around sovereignty, conquest and citizenship. Killing and eating a body, whether animal or human, is a direct expression of power"
• Manuel Schonhorn, 1991



  Allegory of political sovereignty