Anti-Crusoes, Alternative Crusoes: Revisions of the Island Story in the Twentieth Century (original) (raw)
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The Crusoe Trilogy and the Critics During the last two decades, feminist, Marxist, and New Historicist critics have transformed our understanding of the eighteenth-century novel, but none of them has questioned the iconic status of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Even those critics skeptical of the hero's justifications for colonizing ''his'' island accept the commonplace that Defoe's first novel transmutes the raw material of Puritanical injunction and moral self-scrutiny into the psychological realism that helps define the novel form. In turn, Crusoe's individualistic psychology, most critics agree, marks the transition from a residual aristocratic to an emergent bourgeois, capitalist, and (since the 1980s) broadly Foucauldian ideology of selfhood. The titles of many of these critics' works-centering on ''rises'' and ''origins''-reveal a tendency to write the history of modern identity, the rise of the novel, and the rise of financial capitalism in mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing terms. 1 Paradoxically, Robinson Crusoe retains its crucial role in revisionist histories of the novel precisely because Defoe can be credited with (or blamed for) developing a colonialist model of subjectivity: conquering the wilderness and exploiting the labor of native peoples allow the colonizer the luxury of becoming a bourgeois subject. 2 Seen in this light, Crusoe's economic moralizing and religious proselytizing may not quite open a window to the soul, but they do offer a compelling novelistic strategy for representing the psychological complexities of Defoe's reluctant pilgrim. This consensus view of Robinson Crusoe, however, holds up only if critics ignore or explain away the two sequels that Defoe published shortly after his successful first novel. In this essay, I call into question some of the assumptions and values that
The Imaginative Conservative, 2020
The essay is a discussion of Defoe’s novel as an oscillation between a search for a Divine providential meaning in the plights of existence and a more secular interpretation of phenomena. The essay shows how Crusoe as narrator tries to reflect back on his journey as a sort of spiritual self-discovery; however, his own actions and deepest passions (in the form of his naturalistic interpretation of events on the island as well as his excessive attachment to wealth) undermine this spiritual orientation. This oscillation between the explanatory frameworks offered by Christianity and secular modernity, I assert, make the novel still relevant and powerful for us today.
Towards a postmodern reimagining of Robinson Crusoe
Postmodern narratives can be said to be concerned with the questioning of and the destabilization of absolutisms, progress, reason and ideologies, and often involves a reimagining of certain historical and fictional texts. Many postmodern castaway texts such as Concrete Island by J.G Ballard, incorporates features such as allegory, irony, paranoia, and so forth, which echo the events and characters of the original Robinsonade, Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe. These texts are seen to foreground the notions of isolation and loneliness, displacement and paranoia, liminal states, and the characters' struggles to survive, and additionally engages with notions of power, hierarchy, patriarchy, Euro centrism and the colonization of non-whites and the Other. The essence of this essay is to argue that Concrete Island is a postmodern reimagining of the text Robinson Crusoe, and to discuss the literary and postmodern features that allows for this appropriation, with the postmodern theories of Frederic Jameson and Michel Foucault.
Avant, 2021
While Robinson Crusoe is credited with having introduced the desert island and castaway tropes into English literature, it also foregrounds and firmly establishes narratological concepts such as the frame narrative and the inclusion of an author figure. The story of Robinson Crusoe comes to us in the guise of a first-person narrative based in part on a diary. This is where the writer Robinson Crusoe takes the vagaries of his life and shapes them into a coherent exemplary story of individual salvation. 20 th-century novels have picked up on this metafictional aspect of the Robinsonade but usually to ends very different than is the case in Defoe's original. One pertinent example can be found in Muriel Spark's 1958 novel Robinson, which uses its author figure to convey anything but certainty. The essay compares authorial agency and control in Spark's Robinson and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to then move on to the example of J.G. Ballard's Concrete Island (1974). This urban Robinsonade forgoes the convention of having a first-person narrator generating its text, offering instead a third-person narration. My essay argues that the 20 th-century Robinsonade virtually by default participates in discourse around the question of authorship and textual authority, even where an author figure is omitted.
Robinson Crusoe: After the island
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2023
Charting an anti-colonial or even postcolonial current, this article recovers ironic and satirical meanings in Robinson Crusoe. After he leaves the island, Crusoe trades isolation for commercial opportunities in Asia. Alongside other books plundered by Defoe, Dampier’s Voyages is comparable because the pirate-navigator-cartographer is one among many models. As Defoe was negotiating the politics of the English Royal Court at the time of the wars of the Spanish succession, the Farther Adventures (book two) involves Crusoe in a transformative crisis. Reading Defoe and Dampier together supports an argument about postcoloniality, understood in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ironic and restricted sense of a critical broadside against the decolonial hoax that smuggles in neocolonial ideologies. In parallel with Dampier, Crusoe ends up hauling opium from Bengal and running from the East India Company in Cochinchina (present day Vietnam), as Defoe launches a Lockean critique of violence, and profit remains the currency of the realm.
Hermeneutic Castaways: Problems in Reading Robinson Crusoe
300 Jahre "Robinson Crusoe"
2019 marked the tercentenary of the publication of one of the most popular works in the history of the English novel, one that has been reproduced, translated, parodied more than anyotheroverthe past three centuries. When TheLife and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York,Mariner appeared on the 25 April 1719,f ew of its first readers could have anticipated the sensation that it would become. By the time of its authorʼsdeath in 1731, twelve years after the novel'sfirst appearance,the story of the castawaymarooned on his inhospitable island had become so familiar to British and overseas readers that it had spawned ar emarkable number of imitators.I nt hats amey ear,Johann Gottfried Schnabel, in the prefacet oa ne arly imitation, Die Insel Felsenburg,c oined the term 'Robinsonade' to describe the phenomenon. Thereafter Robinsonades would continue to be remediated and translated in vast numbers, in chapbooks, illustrated children'se ditions, religious tracts, lantern shows, pantomimes, and later in films and cartoons. J.M. Coetzee, who achievedsuccess with his own rewriting of the classic tale with the novel Foe,u sed his Nobel Prize speech of 2003 to meditate on the strangew ayst hat Defoeʼsb ook had been appropriated over the generations. Coetzee has Robinson cast his plagiarists,t ranslators,a nd adapters as ac annibal horde, who 'soughttostrike me down and roast me and devour me.' Thinking that he was defending himself against these corruptors of his ownhistory,Coetzee'sC rusoe comes to realise that 'these cannibals were but figures of am ore devilish voracity,that would gnawa tt he very substance of truth.'¹ If, as Harold Bloom argued in TheAnxiety of Influence, manybelated readings are acts of misreading-deliberate or otherwise-then Defoe'snovel must surelybeone of the texts par excellence through which such acts of literary cannibalism have taken place.² Even today, Robinson Crusoe continues to present achallengetoevenits most confident readers who continue to engageinwhat Coetzee called 'gnawing at the truth'. This is hardlysurprising.The book Defoe left the public in 1719 maybecompelling but it is also rambling, uneven, and often bewildering. Virginia Woolf, an
Aiding and Abetting Survival: Americanizing Robinson Crusoe through Adaptation
Litera: Journal of Language, Literature and Culture Studies / Litera: Dil, Edebiyat ve Kültür Araştırmaları Dergisi, 2022
Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) has been insistently adapted to both the big screen and TV throughout the 20 th century and well into the 21 st , the earliest version dating back to 1902 and the most recent to 2016. Although a full list of all versions would be elusive and also redundant, almost 50 adaptations are readily available for viewing and/or for analysis. Moving away from the 'fidelity' criticism in the earlier vein of adaptation studies and proceeding from the argument that all adaptations are essentially rewritings, alternative ways in which the source text may be reconstructed in an ultimately intertextual framework, this paper scrutinizes American screen adaptations of Robinson Crusoe, namely Robinson Crusoe on Mars (Dir. Byron Haskin, 1964), Lt. Robinson Crusoe, U.S.N. (Dir. Byron Paul, 1966), and Cast Away (Dir. Robert Zemeckis, 2000). Far from shedding new light on an almost-exhausted source text, these rewritings reflect more about their own discourses, relating to the historical and social contexts of their own making. In so doing, they 'Americanize' Robinson Crusoe. As such, three centuries after its publication, Robinson Crusoe is still being repeatedly reinvented and reconstructed in film, and this analysis investigates the dialogical relations among these adaptations while, at the same time, emphasizing how every new adapted version of a work of literature aids and abets the survival of its source text.
International Journal of English and Studies, 2021
Although New-Historicism and Reader-response literary theories suggest different attempts in the generation of meaning, in fact, they exist in separate domains. However, the connection between them is a matter of the existence of a text. Without doubt, on the most basic and cursory level, New Historicism is aimed at decoding the manner and culture prevalent in a particular time of history as encoded in the text while Reader-response firmly comes from the strength that a work of art cannot generate meaning for itself without the reader. From this measure of understanding, the clarity in the amalgamation possibility becomes clear. In Robinson Crusoe (1719) analysis here, the intention is to identify the meaning of realism construction the researcher gives to it but within the historical context of the 18th century English novel. On this significant scope the twin theories of New-Historicism and Reader-response become unavoidable tools in the research investigation.