Robinson Crusoe’s influence has been so powerful that this single work of literature has spawned an entire genre: the Robinsonade. This is the name given to those Crusoe-like stories which involve shipwreck, a desert island, and encountering a strange new society or person There are thousands upon thousands of books and films, plays and poems, tv shows and comic books which take up the Robinson theme.

Defoe’s novel has left a lasting, powerful, complicated, and often dangerous myth in the popular imagination.

In this week’s episode I talk to Dr Ian Kinane about Crusoe and the Robinsonade, about egomania and colonialism, 18th-century fiction and reality TV.