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"Robinsonades."
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Robinson Crusoe after 300 Years
There is no shortage of explanations for the longevity of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe , which has been interpreted as both religious allegory and frontier myth, with Crusoe seen as an example of the self-sufficient adventurer and the archetypal colonizer and capitalist.
eBook
Theorising literary Islands
Theorising Literary Islands is a literary and cultural study of both how and why the trope of the island functions within contemporary popular Robinsonade narratives. It traces the development of Western “islomania” – or our obsession with islands – from its origins in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe right up to contemporary Robinsonade texts, focusing predominantly on American and European representations of fictionalized Pacific Island topographies in contemporary literature, film, television, and other media. Theorising Literary Islands argues that the ubiquity of island landscapes within the popular imagination belies certain ideological and cultural anxieties, and posits that the emergence of a Western popular culture tradition can largely be traced through the development of the Robinsonade genre, and through early European and American fascination with the Pacific region.
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Not Just a Commercial Voyage: A Cultural-Historical Perspective of the East Indiaman Compton's Voyage to Bombay (1723–26)
This essay aims to give an account of the untold and unexpected events faced by the crew of the Compton, one of the East India Company's vessels that set out on a routine trade voyage from Deptford to Bombay in April 1723. Under the command of Captain William Mawson, scrupulous compiler of the logbook, the ship proceeded along the known routes indicated by the East India Company (EIC) charts, and through the passages recommended by the navigation manuals. Finding consonance with recent research suggestions on “alternative histories” of the EIC, this article brings to light the narrative potentialities of the logbook, which is therefore considered not only a technical device, but also a tool for reconstructing the actual experience of navigation. This is the approach of the historical geodatabase of European global navigation Global Sea Routes (GSR), which bases its research method on ship's logs and other primary sources produced by the practitioners themselves. In order to provide a richer account of the known history of the EIC's shipping in the early modern age, this essay will analyse Mawson's logbook, highlighting its peculiarities as a container for a wealth of information useful for creating a narrative construction.
Journal Article
Writes of Passage
Writes of Passage explores the interplay between a system of \"othering\" which travelers bring to a place, and the \"real\" geographical difference they discover upon arrival. Exposing the tensions between the imaginary and real, Duncan and Gregory and a team of leading internationa contributors focus primarily upon travelers from the 18th and 19th Centuries to pin down the imaginary within the context of imperial power. The contributors focus on travel to three main regions: Africa, South Asia, and Europe - wit the European examples being drawn from Britain, France and Greece.
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Sacred Ties of Brotherhood
This essay analyzes narrative patterns of colonist-indigenous relations within Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and two Robinsonade texts, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Catharine Parr Traill’s Canadian Crusoes (1852). Within the latter texts, the multiplication of Crusoe into “castaway” groups allows for an investigation of the social collateral of reaffirming racial hierarchies via settlers’ allegiance to indigenous individuals while destroying larger indigenous communities. In The Last of the Mohicans, the hybrid Cora Munroe and the Mohican Uncas’s love for her threatens the established pattern of homosocial interracial friendship; their deaths reaffirm racial boundaries. Conversely, by depicting a “coterie” of Scotch, French-Canadian, hybrid, and Mohawk members, Canadian Crusoes self-consciously rewrites the tragedy of Cooper’s novel so that sororal love enables cross-cultural marriage. Nevertheless, Traill’s proleptic descriptions of Canadian settlement mark her narrative as an alternate history that diverges from the progressive alienation of Native communities.
Journal Article
Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace as Ironic Robinsonade, Ironic Akedah
According to such a reading, Isaac was meant to be sacrificed for the sins of the community. Each man or woman is responsible for his or her own actions and has an unmediated relationship with God. [...]any interpretation of Isaac as a sacrifice for the sins of the community has no place in Judaic tradition.19 However, as Spiegel points out, living amidst Christian communities, most particularly in the Middle Ages, Jews saw themselves as continually under attack from without. [...]just before Cohn clips Buz's wires and takes away his speech, Buz has been caught in the vines on the tree where he has been sleeping, reminiscent of the ram caught in the thicket. From a human standpoint, this is indeed a novel with Frank Kermode's \"sense of an ending.\" Since the novel encapsulates so many stories both biblical and literary, it is difficult to know if this story is the story of Noah and the flood, Moses and the Tablets of the Law, Robinson Crusoe and his island, or the story of the Akedah.
Journal Article
Alien Life Imagined
One day, astrobiologists could make the most fantastic discovery of all time: the detection of complex extraterrestrial life. As space agencies continue to search for life in our Universe, fundamental questions are raised: are we awake to the revolutionary effects on human science, society and culture that alien contact will bring? And how is it possible to imagine the unknown? In this book, Mark Brake tells the compelling story of how the portrayal of extraterrestrial life has developed over the last two and a half thousand years. Taking examples from the history of science, philosophy, film and fiction, he showcases how scholars, scientists, film-makers and writers have devoted their energies to imagining life beyond this Earth. From Newton to Kubrick, and Lucian to H. G. Wells, this is a fascinating account for anyone interested in the extraterrestrial life debate, from general readers to amateur astronomers and undergraduate students studying astrobiology.
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