Journalism and Mass Comm Students Create Website Devoted To Alexander Selkirk

Students at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill have joined forces with students at the University of the Andes in Santiago, Chile, to create a website devoted to Alexander Selkirk, generally believed to be the major inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s character Robinson Crusoe. Read more about the venture here. For more about the intersection between law and literature in Defoe’s work, and about real castaways on the island that might have inspired Defoe’s novel, here are some references.

John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary (University of Chicago Press, 1989)

Joseph Xavier Saintine, The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe (Kessinger Publishing, 2004 reprint)

Wolfram Schmidgen, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property (Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Tim Severin, In Search of Robinson Crusoe (Perseus, 2003)

Diana Souhami, Selkirk’s Island (Harcourt, 2002)