Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with his Vision of the Angelick World, first published in 1720 and considered a sequel to The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, is a collection of essays written in the voice of the Crusoe character. Expressing Defoe’s thoughts about many moral questions of the day, the narrator takes up isolation, poverty, religious liberty, and epistemology. Defoe also used this volume to revive his interest in poetry, not the satiric poetry of the early eighteenth century, but the more inspirational verse that appeared in some of his later works. Serious Reflections also includes an imaginative flight in which Crusoe wanders among the planets, a return to the moon voyage impulse of Defoe’s 1705 work The Consolidator. Illuminating the ideas and philosophy of this most influential of English novelists, it is invaluable for any student of the period.
 

"Robinson Crusoe takes credit in the Preface for the authorship of this third part of the trilogy of The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, but this book is markedly different from the first two volumes. Crusoe rambles through a dozen large questions of social and religious morality which he contends are allegorized in his life. Even the best readers of Defoe can benefit from having a guide through this philosophical labyrinth. Fortunately, the introduction and notes to this superbly edited volume provide the necessary guidance and insight to make the Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe accessible, perhaps for the first time." - editor of The Works of Daniel Defoe: Satire, Fantasy, and Supernatural Writings

"The editors of Serious Reflections provide useful, contextual, and reasonably tempered reflections of their own on the abundant run of Defoe’s material. Serious Reflections is a kind of topographical survey of the early eighteenth-century mind and this definitive edition charts that survey with a wonderful scholarly and critical agility throughout." - author of Exile and the Narrative Imagination

"Robinson Crusoe takes credit in the Preface for the authorship of this third part of the trilogy of The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, but this book is markedly different from the first two volumes. Crusoe rambles through a dozen large questions of social and religious morality which he contends are allegorized in his life. Even the best readers of Defoe can benefit from having a guide through this philosophical labyrinth. Fortunately, the introduction and notes to this superbly edited volume provide the necessary guidance and insight to make the Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe accessible, perhaps for the first time." - editor of The Works of Daniel Defoe: Satire, Fantasy, and Supernatural Writings

"The editors of Serious Reflections provide useful, contextual, and reasonably tempered reflections of their own on the abundant run of Defoe’s material. Serious Reflections is a kind of topographical survey of the early eighteenth-century mind and this definitive edition charts that survey with a wonderful scholarly and critical agility throughout." - author of Exile and the Narrative Imagination