Global Crusoe: Comparative Literature, Postcolonial Theory and Transnational Aesthetics

171 Pages·2011·1.299 MB·English

by  Ann Marie Fallon

Global Crusoe
Global Crusoe travels across the twentieth-century globe, from a Native american
reservation to a botswanan village, to explore the huge variety of contemporary
incarnations of Daniel Defoe’s intrepid character. In her study of the novels,
poems, short stories, and films that adapt the Crusoe myth, Ann Marie Fallon
argues that the twentieth-century Crusoe is not a lone, struggling survivor, but
a cosmopolitan figure who serves as a warning against the dangers of individual
isolation and colonial oppression. Fallon uses feminist and postcolonial theory to
reexamine Defoe’s original novel and several contemporary texts, showing how
writers take up the traumatic narratives of Crusoe in response to the intensifying
transnational and postcolonial experiences of the second half of the twentieth
century. reading texts by authors such as Nadine Gordimer, bessie Head, Derek
Walcott, Elizabeth Bishop, and J.M. Coetzee within their social, historical, and
political contexts, Fallon shows how contemporary revisions of the novel reveal
the tensions inherent in the transnational project as people and ideas move across
borders with frequency, if not necessarily with ease. In the novel Robinson Crusoe,
Crusoe’s discovery of “Friday’s footprint” fills him with such anxiety that he feels
the print like an animal and burrows into his shelter. likewise, modern readers
and writers continue to experience a deep anxiety when confronting the narrative
issues at the center of Crusoe’s story
For Justin, Maddie, and Elinor
Global Crusoe
Comparative literature, Postcolonial Theory
and Transnational aesthetics
Ann MAriE FAllon
Portland State University, USA
First published 2011 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright © Ann Marie Fallon 2011
Ann Marie Fallon has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as the author of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Fallon, Ann Marie.
Global Crusoe: comparative literature, postcolonial theory and transnational aesthetics.
1. Defoe, Daniel, 1661?–1731. Robinson Crusoe. 2. Defoe, Daniel, 1661?–1731 –
Adaptations. 3. Crusoe, Robinson (Fictitious character) 4. Transnationalism in literature.
5. Postcolonialism in literature. 6. Robinsonades – History and criticism.
I. Title
809.3’87-dc22
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fallon, Ann Marie.
Global Crusoe: comparative literature, postcolonial theory and transnational aesthetics /
by Ann Marie Fallon.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-2998-2 (hardcover: alk. paper)
1. Robinsonades. 2. Defoe, Daniel, 1661?–1731—Adaptations. 3. Defoe, Daniel, 1661?–
1731—Influence. 4. Crusoe, Robinson (Fictitious character) 5. Identity (Psychology) in
literature. 6. Islands in literature. 7. Postcolonialism in literature. 8. Globalization and
literature. 9. Transnationalism and literature. I. Title. II . Title: Comparative literature,
postcolonial theory and transnational aesthetics.
PN3432.F35 2011
809’.93353—dc23
2011025440
ISBN: 9781409429982 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781315584782 (ebk)
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 Literary Revision and Robinson Crusoe 17
2 Revision and Dislocation in The Life and Strange Surprising
Adventures of Robinson Crusoe 33
3 “The First True Creole”: Creation Stories in Derek Walcott and
Sam Selvon 53
4 South African Revisions: J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer,
and Bessie Head 77
5 Cannibal Desires: Feminist Revision and Marianne Wiggins’
John Dollar 97
6 Beloved Island: Transnational Revision, Translation, and
Victoria Slavuski’s Música para olvidar una isla 115
7 “The World is Full of Islands” 131
Bibliography 147
Index 157
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Acknowledgements
Editors and publishers have kindly granted permission to reprint material that first
appeared in condensed or slightly different form as “Rethinking the American
Novel in Victoria Slavuski’s Música para olvidar una isla,” Latin American
Literary Review 34.67 (2006); “Citing Robinson Crusoe: Narrative Revision
and Literary History,” Literature Compass 1.1 (2004); “Is There a Transnational
Literary Aesthetic?” Common Ground Publishing 2.2 (2004); and “Julieta Campos
and the Repeating Island: An Overview Essay,” Review of Contemporary Fiction
26.2 (2006).
At Portland State University my work was assisted by many colleagues,
especially Peter Carafiol, Jeff Gerwing, Shawn Smallman, and Lawrence Wheeler.
At the University of Virginia, Jahan Ramazani, Rita Felski, Teju Olaniyan, and
Cynthia Wall provided generous intellectual support. Editor Ann Donahue at
Ashgate Publishing made this book possible. Above all I owe an enormous debt to
Justin Fallon Dollard, for making an island in which to work.
This page has been left blank intentionally
Introduction
Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
(1719) tells the story of one man’s survival on a deserted island. Sometimes
referred to as the first English novel, the text created an early script for the
European colonial project at the beginning of the eighteenth century.1 Soon after
the novel’s publication, Robinson Crusoe started on a journey across languages and
continents, plagiarized, republished, and translated into multiple languages. Martin
Green claims only the Bible can compete with the translations and re-publications
of Defoe’s novel.2 The popularity of Robinson Crusoe, and its “canonical” status
as the first English novel, suggests that the text represents a kind of myth of the
modern condition. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so many novels,
plays, and short stories revised the story of the island castaway that the French
identified these texts as their own genre, the Robinsonade. The nineteenth-century
Robinsonades celebrated European colonial power. As Europeans, particularly
the British, expanded their territorial and imaginative conquest, Robinson Crusoe
became synonymous with Empire: “The production of Robinsonades peaked in
the Victorian period, with an average of more than two per year. In addition, 110
translations appeared in print before 1900, alongside at least 115 revisions.”3 These
nineteenth-century Robinsonades, which generally focused solely on the island
section of the novel, firmly established the Crusoe myth as a story of celebratory
colonialism in the popular imagination.
Defoe himself built the novel on transnational sources including, possibly, an
Arabic novel, newly translated in Defoe’s early career.4 As Defoe’s novel became
a regular cottage industry of imitations, revisions and rehearsals across the rapidly
globalizing economy of the time, it became itself the product of this new global
experience. We can productively understand Defoe’s project as not just a rehearsal
for colonialism, which it certainly became by the nineteenth century, but an
expression of an emergent cosmopolitan self of the early eighteenth century that
typifies modernity. This newly and uniquely cosmopolitan selfhood emerges before
the dominating English colonial project takes hold. Several important studies have
examined the life of Robinsonades and their influence, especially on colonial
discourse through the end of the nineteenth century. Global Crusoe travels across
1 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley, 1957), pp. 60–92. In this chapter on
Robinson Crusoe, Watt describes Defoe’s major innovations in creating a new genre of
social realism.
2 Martin Green, The Robinson Crusoe Story (University Park, 1990), p. 72.
3 Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure (London,
1997), pp. 24–5.
4 Lamia Mohamed Baeshen, Robinson Crusoe and Hayy Bin Yaqzan: A Comparative
Study (Diss., University of Arizona, 1986).