Dystopian and Utopian Omission of Discourse in Three Modern Robinsonades: Lord of the Flies, Concrete Island, The Red Turtle
PDF

Keywords

Robinsonade
Defoe
metafiction
discourse
narrator
dystopia

How to Cite

Gill, P. . (2019). Dystopian and Utopian Omission of Discourse in Three Modern Robinsonades: Lord of the Flies, Concrete Island, The Red Turtle. Porównania, 25(2), 145–156. https://doi.org/10.14746/por.2019.2.9

Abstract

The story of Robinson Crusoe comes to us in the guise of a first-person narrative based in part on a diary. Successor texts have traditionally adopted the same narrative situation, exploiting it in order to foreground ideas of authorship, textual authority and linguistic dominance. This essay pays particularly close attention to those Robinsonades that have not followed this pattern and have instead opted to omit meta-narration and intradiegetic narrator figures. It considers to what ends this is done in three modern Robinsonades: William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), J. G. Ballard’s Concrete Island (1974), and Michael Dudok de Wit’s animated film The Red Turtle (2016).

https://doi.org/10.14746/por.2019.2.9
PDF

References

Ballard, J. G. 1974. Concrete Island. London: Fourth Estate, 2014.

Barrie, J. M. Peter Pan and Other Plays. Ed. Peter Hollindale. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Birdsall, Virginia Ogden. Defoe’s Perpetual Seekers: A Study of the Major Fiction. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1985.

Defoe, Daniel. 1719. Robinson Crusoe: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. Ed. Michael Shinagel. New York: Norton, 1994.

Fallon, Ann Marie. Global Crusoe: Comparative Literature, Postcolonial Theory and Transnational Aesthetics. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.

Golding, William. 1954. Lord of the Flies. London: Penguin, 1960.

Green, Martin. The Robinson Crusoe Story. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990.

Kinane, Ian. Theorising Literary Islands: The Island Trope in Contemporary Robinsonade Narratives. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017.

Mitchell, Adrian. Man Friday and Mind Your Head. London: Eyre Methuen, 1974.

Orr, Leonard. “The Utopian Disasters of J. G. Ballard”. CLA Journal 43(4) (2000). 479-493.

The Red Turtle. Dir. Michael Dudok de Wit. Culver City: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2017.

Richetti, John. “Defoe as Narrative Innovator.” The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe. Ed. John Richetti. Cambrige: Cambridge UP, 2008. 121-138.

Stevens, Isabel. “Cast Away.” Sight & Sound. July 2016. 35.