Employing New Historicist and cultural materialist methods in the postcolonial framework, we would like to argue that CRK represents how the efforts to educate local young people through the promotion of literacy and literature attempt to negotiate 18th- and 19th-century liberal humanist views with local Sundanese values, the result of which is still apparent today in contemporary Sundanese ideals. This paper intends to show the relationship between the colonial socio-political context in the Dutch-Indies and the transition of the Sundanese society into the liberal economy and its various modes of expression which rely on the modern publishing industry and print technology. This text was translated into Sundanese and printed in the Cacarakan script to serve as reading material for local children in the context of the Ethical Policy. The publication by Landsdrukkerij (the Dutch colonial government publishing house) of _Carita Robinson Krusoe_ (CRK) in 1879 as a translation of presumably a Dutch Robinson Crusoe (1719) indicates the effort to offer the figure of Robinson Crusoe as model for the modern Sundanese man but retaining the specific characteristics of local cultural values held by members of the middle class and nobility of the Priangan region at the time.
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