Since Rousseau's praise of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) as a ‘complete treatise on natural education’ (1783, 59), the heroes of Robinsonades have frequently been employed as role models for young adults. The best-known examples are probably the young adult protagonists of R.M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1857), who ‘highlight the physical and moral fortitude of […] British boy heroes’ and provide models for Victorian muscular Christianity (Elleray, 2013, 167, 170). In the twentieth century, the tradition of heroic, stranded young adults continued. Much-beloved characters include Karana, heroine of Scott O’Dell's Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960), who builds a home for herself and learns to live self-sufficiently on her own island (see Ian Kinane’s chapter, ‘Shifting Perspectives in Two Twentieth-Century Robinsonades’, in this collection), and Walter Farley's Alec who, in The Black Stallion (1941), is stranded on a desert island with a wild horse he sets out to tame, subduing the animal as Crusoe does the island. More contemporarily, Terry Pratchett's Nation (2008) is an early twenty-first-century Robinsonade that has only rarely been the subject of scholarly interest. Blanka Grzegorczyk discusses the novel with regard to ‘contending [humanist and postmodernist] approaches to subjectivity’, arguing that an analysis of the narrative shows a clash between postmodern techniques and humanist values (2010, 112, 128). As Grzegorczyk asserts, Pratchett's use of techniques such as ‘multistranded narration and multiple focalizing characters draw[s] attention to the impossibility of totalizing narrative structures’ (2010, 128). Such structures, so Grzegorczyk argues, are ‘formally postmodern’, while the values expressed in the novel reiterate humanist ‘assumptions about the nature of human relationships and of the role of the master narrative’ (2010, 128). Similarly, Maria Błaszkiewicz argues that Pratchett's story gains much of its power for young readers from ‘its pattern of structural, symbolic and ideological reversals’ (2015, 267). Adrienne Kertzer, discussing Nation in the context of its portrayal of nationality and concepts of the nation, reads Pratchett’s alternative history as a ‘hopeful’ text that ‘contest[s] dominant cultural memories of the nation’ (2013, 211). As this very brief survey suggests, virtually all articles on Nation recognise that Pratchett is involved in expressing ‘values’ (Grzegorczyk, 2010, 128) and transmitting ‘ideological concerns’ (Błaszkiewicz, 2015, 267), or even proposing a ‘vision’ for the future (Kertzer, 2013, 211).