Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe has been hailed as the first English novel. It certainly was one of the most influential among the early English novels, and it was directly responsible for creating the genre of the desert island novel, or Robinsonade. Secondary criticism usually treats Robinson Crusoe in one of two ways. Critics sometimes look from Crusoe forward. They discover in Crusoe the seeds of the English social novel, with its emphasis on empirical reality, verisimilitude, and detailed observation. They also describe the influence of Enlightenment philosophical and economic thought on Defoe's work. A second group of critics aligns itself with G. A. Starr and J. Paul Hunter. They tend to look from Crusoe backward to identify the dominant influences on the themes and structure of Defoe's novel.

Crusoe appears sandwiched between the genres of religious writing popular in the seventeenth century — especially the spiritual autobiography — and the well-developed novels of the mid and late eighteenth century. Although it is an important transitional work because of its focus on individual psychology and empirical detail, it also includes a great deal of material that is explicitly religious. The spiritual aspect of the text differs from Bunyan's work in two important respects: reason is far more important in this text and the story is primarily fictional rather than allegorical, its editor's claims notwithstanding.