By Diana Loxley
The wasteland island has been one of many strong and insistent motifs in British literature and this booklet offers with the copy of the wilderness island fable throughout the period of excessive imperialism in nineteenth century Britain. The e-book examines a sequence of works from Defoe to Stevenson. The analyses of the e-book are interwoven into the contexts of Empire and exploration, the cult of masculinity, the schooling process and nineteenth century technological know-how and expertise. The booklet demanding situations literary culture via exhibiting how the foremost issues of British colonialism and imperialism are published in those successive reworkings of the "Robinson Crusoe" narrative.
Read or Download Problematic Shores: The Literature of Islands PDF
Best movements & periods books
The Power and the Glory (Cliffs Notes study guide)
This Christian parable is a compelling and enlightening learn. It tells the tale of a "whisky priest" in Mexico, who's at the lam. even though a self-confessed imperfect guy, the priest still upholds his tasks to the Church and to existence.
How a ways is the United States From right here? techniques American countries and cultures from a comparative and interdisciplinary viewpoint. it's very a lot on the middle of this comparative time table that “America” be regarded as a hemispheric and international subject. It discusses American identities relationally, even if the relatives below dialogue function in the borders of the USA, through the Americas, and/or around the globe.
Freedom and the Arts : essays on music and literature
Is there a second in historical past while a piece gets its perfect interpretation? Or is negotiation continuously required to maintain the earlier and accommodate the current? the liberty of interpretation, Charles Rosen indicates in those gleaming explorations of tune and literature, exists in a fragile stability with constancy to the identification of the unique paintings.
Extra info for Problematic Shores: The Literature of Islands
Example text
So for texts like Verne's which so peremptorily refuse to be classified according to pre-established categories (whether generic - for example, the comic, the tragic or the realist - or discursive the scientific, geographic or historic) there has been a considerable problem. Historically, this problem has been 'solved' by nominating Jules Verne as the 'Inventor of Science Fiction' and therefore also as the originator of a previously non-existent series. The two 26 Problematic Shores: The Literature of Islands most incompatible aspects of his texts are thus condensed and combined in order to resolve the difficulty of a contradiction: the word 'inventor' (or 'creator') bestows upon the individual producer the responsibility for a construction which is, at one and the same time, both scientific and fictive, for something which claims a certain relationship to knowledge and truth but which, on the other hand, cannot be understood as an uncontaminated transcription of it.
My argument is that The Mysterious Island constitutes in its form as well as its denouement a condensation and consolidation of the entire Vernien project. An Encyclopedie in itself, it provides 'resolutions' to several problems which some of his earlier and more important works had set out but left in suspension. But most significantly, it is a text which, although written against the wishes of Hetzel, may in fact be seen as an attempt to fulfil the aims of his literary enterprise as a whole as they were outlined in 1886: 'to summarize all the ...
16). That The Mysterious Island should look so earnestly towards Robinson Crusoe - that supreme mythologisation of genesis and recreation - in order to accomplish this task is, as will be argued, hardly accidental. The Latitudes of Empire: Jules Verne's Mysterious Islands 35 The world, in its ultimate trustworthiness as much as in its initial strangeness, is always extended before the Vernien hero as a 'text' to be read and decoded. The act of reading - which also necessarily involves the possibility of a misreading (a crucial aspect of so many of his texts) - is frequently figured in the decipherment of a series of codes, traces, trails or documents some of which, if correctly interpreted, will lead to the elucidation of a mystery or to a central point (for example, the centre of the earth, a hidden person, a central fire).