The Unexpurgated Robinson Crusoe (original) (raw)
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His-Story and Her-Story: A Comparative Study of Robinson Crusoe and Foe
Journal of foreign languages, 2020
History is often said to be his-story owing to it being exclusively written by men about men. It consists of heroic as well as tragic tales of men, heroic and tragic both terms being exploited by Aristotle in the context of men again. Literature of any nation or language is also History per se as it reflects the ethos of the time in which it is created, and can also be called His-story because of dominant presence of male voices on the literary horizon for centuries. It is only after the surge of movements and theories like Feminism and Postcolonialism, that Her-story started to surface up in literary works. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (first published in 1719) and Foe by J. M. Coetzee (rewriting of Robinson Crusoe, first published in 1986) are the two works showcasing this transition in focus from His-story to Her-story. Whereas one tells the story of a male castaway Robinson Crusoe who turns out to be a powerful, colonial patriarch, completely avoiding the existence of woman; the other tells the story of Susan Barton, a female castaway introduced by Coetzee into the world of Crusoe (Cruso here). Coetzee has not altogether done away, however, with the centuries long suppression of female voice as he introduces the fictional character of Foe (modelled on the writer Daniel Defoe) whom Susan wants to pen the story of her stay on "Cruso"s island". Novel for a major part revolves around Susan"s efforts to get her story written and published the way she wants it to, with Foe insisting on giving it a new direction and plot disregarding Susan"s concern for the story of Friday (Cruso"s black manservant on the island whom Susan brings with her to the mainland, Cruso having died on the ship). Susan wants to tell the (hi)story of Friday"s silencing (his tongue having cut off) and thus make a place for herself in the history, but for Foe, the story is not attractive enough as the truth is too boring to be told nakedly. This paper, thus attempts a comparative analysis of both the works, focusing on how difficult it is to get Her-story told without it being influenced by his-story or his opinions, thereby drawing our attention to the fact that no voice or no story is entirely original and thus reliable.
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.
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
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.
NOVEL ORIGINS- NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES AND STORYTELLING IN FOE AND ROBINSON CRUSOE
Novels emerged as a genre in the 18 th century, and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) is widely regarded as the genesis of the form; the catalyst for new narrative techniques to emerge. Robinson Crusoe has maintained immense popularity and staying power, not only birthing a genre but its own classification of literature-robinsonades, "any novels written in imitation of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe that deals with the problem of the castaway's survival" (Britannica, 2007). A prime example is Foe by J.M. Coetzee, published in 1986; a robinsonade that transforms the original by operating from a different point of view. Though the discourse generated by each novel differs, taken together, both are representative of origins: of the novel itself in Robinson Crusoe and of the author in Foe. A surface-level reading could view Foe as a feminist reimagining of Robinson Crusoe, as it's told by a female castaway, Susan Barton. But, through further analysis, there is a depth of meaning found in the subtle narrative techniques employed by Coetzee. I will argue that this depth reveals a greater interest in storytelling, the Friday-shaped "hole of the narrative" , and authorship (Foe, 121). Further, Coetzee's subversions are meant to challenge the representation of colonialism intrinsic to Robinson Crusoe, given the time of publication. In this essay, I will attempt to illuminate the subtleties of Coetzee's writing technique. I will explore the deliberate intertextual relationship between Foe and Robinson Crusoe to show how he uses many of the same conventions to create discourse with the original while subverting the way they shape the narrative and engage us as readers. We will see that much of Coetzee's disruption is aimed at unsettling the bond between a story and an author. His counter-narrative speaks to the subjectivity of truth and shows how it alters from individual to individual.
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.
Confronting Authority: JM Coetzee's Foe and the Remaking of Robinson Crusoe
International Fiction Review, 1991
The process of remaking Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe continues as each successive generation since 1719 has taken the Crusoe myth, reconsidered it, reshaped it, repudiated it-and still we have not finished with this strange man, his island, and his Friday. In this century alone, writers the likes of H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Rose Macauley, Muriel Spark, E.L. Doctorow, William Golding, and Richard Hughes (to name only a few) have grappled with Defoe's creation in an attempt to silence his presence once and for all. As Martin Green has suggested in his recent study, The Robinson Crusoe Story, Crusoe is a towering figure in literature: his tale has been hailed as the first English novel, the first story of psychological realism, the first adventure narrative, and the most compelling myth of Empire. 1 Indeed, so powerful is this father of literature, an entire genre, the Robinsonnade, has been named in his honor. And as this name suggests-Robinsonnade-Crusoe exists in each of these remaking-a trace, a shadow, a subtext. He is always there, in the margins.
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.
Modern Philology, 2016
This volume brings together eleven essays on Robinson Crusoe published by Maximillian E. Novak in journals and colloquia between 1996 and 2012. Each essay explores a different way of raising the vexed question of the nature of Defoe's "realism"-the distinguishing quality of his fiction that many readers have experienced, but few can convincingly define. In an introductory essay that provides a retrospective of his career, Novak recalls his arrival at Oxford in the mid-1950s to begin his graduate studies. He was drawn to work on Defoe in two ways: he wanted to understand "Defoe's world and the ways in which he saw the problems of his time" and also "the methods by which Defoe succeeded in creating a sense of the real" (2). The first of these interests led to Novak's groundbreaking works of historical criticism, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (1962) and Defoe and the Nature of Man (1963); the second led to Realism, Myth and History in Defoe's Fiction (1983) and to the essays in the volume under review. For Novak, each of these questions is answered in terms of the other: that is, what is real about Defoe's fiction is that it is set firmly in a historical context, while the historicity is subordinated to an enlivening personal consciousness. Defoe's fictional histories use "a variety of devices for evoking the real through awakening the imagination of the reader, asking him/her to see what was not fully in the text" (5). It is the variety of Defoe's devices for stimulating the reader's imagination that Novak explores through these essays. One device that Defoe adapted from the visual arts is the representation of ordinary objects and persons in paintings. In an early essay on the novel, Sir Walter Scott noted the influence on Defoe of the Dutch and Flemish realist painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who represented