Abstract. What makes Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) a magnet to both the general public and scholars worldwide? We will argue in the present paper that the answer to this question lies not in matters of style and literary refinement or in the way in which human passions are rendered, but rather in the simple, unartificial, practical and down-to-earth approach to everything human, thereby Defoe building a narrative – imbued as it is with religious and spiritual ideas – that has something in it of the dimension of a universal myth, of the kind we can find in Homer’s Odyssey.

Key words: adventure; myth; island; disaster / wreck; Odyssey; virtue; Puritanism; self-examination

Preda IA (2022) Robinson Crusoe: a Puritan Odyssey. Stroe MA, ed. Creativity 5(1): 3–17. doi:10.22381/C5120221