(Re) Writing the Island Cartographies of desire in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, J. M. Coetzee's Foe, Jane Gardam's Crusoe's Daughter and Julieta Campos' The Fear of Losing Eurydice & A Novel, Bodeg
This thesis writes back against the representation of the island in colonial discourse as a tabula rasa, easily possessed and inscribed. In colonial narratives island possession also emerges as explicitly gendered: the male castaway seeks to control the permissive, feminised territory of the island....
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2018
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/67912/ https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/67912/1/2018ReddPhDfinal.pdf |
| Summary: | This thesis writes back against the representation of the island in colonial discourse as a tabula rasa, easily possessed and inscribed. In colonial narratives island possession also emerges as explicitly gendered: the male castaway seeks to control the permissive, feminised territory of the island. It is this interpretation of the island, this gendered process of possession and inscription, that my thesis interrogates and subverts. My critical thesis is an analysis of Robinson Crusoe and three of its revisionary texts –– J M Coetzee’s Foe, Jane Gardam’s Crusoe’s Daughter and Julieta Campos’ The Fear of Losing Eurydice. I conduct a ‘ground-clearing’ exercise of Robinson Crusoe, critically remapping the island from a tabula rasa to an embodied construction of appetite and desire. My analysis of Foe and Crusoe’s Daughter explores how the texts’ women protagonists navigate the masculine terrain of Crusoe’s island, and how their authors negotiate an intertextual relationship with Robinson Crusoe. My analysis of The Fear of Losing Eurydice shows how Campos draws upon a discourse of desire to delegitimise linear narratives of colonial island possession. The desire for the island becomes a call uttered across multiple times and spaces, leading to Campos’ creation of the ‘archipelago of desire’; a motif which remaps Western insular cartographies to stress the relationality between the Caribbean, Asia, Europe, and Africa. I trace these cartographies of desire, charting the ways in which these novels disturb the terrain, and transgress the boundaries of Crusoe’s island. My novel, Bodeg, is set on a fictional island in the Arctic circle. Remote, desolate, bubbling with a molten undercurrent of menace, Bodeg is a volcanic island which has claimed the lives and minds of travellers. The novel follows Rebecca and her adult twins, Anna and Daniel, who visit the island. Rebecca is retracing the steps of an old love, Jake, whilst Anna seeks respite from a stale marriage. Daniel suffers from a mental health disorder that causes ... |
|---|