Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
...Why do you say that Robinson Crusoe should be included? It was certainly a great novel, by I don't know that it changed the world...
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I was not intending to suggest that it should be in the list, but just that as it is an example of the tribe of books back in history that have created, and so changed the world in so far as literature as we know it is concerned. That with respect to my contention that perhaps these books that paved the way to the literary world as we know it, and in which world more modern novels reside, may be more important in a world changing way than any modern novel can be?
Apart from its merits along those lines (recognising though that it is but one of a tribe of books establishing literature as we know it) Robinson Crusoe was also very influential in establishing fiction in book form as popular reading (that in my view, but again it was not alone in that) as from the first edition it has been one of the most read books (there were, I think, four editions in its first year). Its complexity, fluid prose, etc. being a step beyond what had gone before gives it an important position in the development of English literature. Again, I am not suggesting that it is alone in that, but just suggesting that books such as this (and Gilgamesh, being one of many other examples and perhaps the first) may be more important in changing the world than the modern novels that followed because they paved the way for those later novels.
EDIT: As Hamlet53 said
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