Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade : New Paradigms for Young Readers
- Submitting institution
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Roehampton University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 915659
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Liverpool University Press
- ISBN
- 978-1-789-62004-7
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This seven-chapter edited collection, Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade (2019), contains two texts that I sole authored: the general introduction (‘The Robinson Genre and the Didactic Impulse: A Reassessment’) and my chapter ‘Shifting Perspectives in Two-Mid-Twentieth Century Robinsonades’. In my role as editor of the volume, I sought to redress the contemporary critical imbalance in relation to the Robinsonade genre by investigating lesser-known Robinsonades. I set out to extend the investigation of the existing relationship between didactics and the Robinsonade genre, and to explore the (largely overlooked) progressive shifts in its form, and the ways in which modern iterations of the Robinsonade question assumed generic practices. I also aimed editorially to focus attention on works by female authors and/or those with female protagonists, in order to redress the gender imbalance within the genre and to provide scholarship on some lesser-known but equally meritorious texts. Regarding the research findings presented in my own chapter: I conclude that both Scott O’Dell and Michel Tournier employ the Robinsonade to mount their respective critiques of U.S. and French imperialism in Island of the Blue Dolphin and Friday and Robinson, and that the Robinsonade is employed as a tool to resist and comment upon imperialist, nationalist practices. These findings go largely against the grain of other such work on Robinsonade fictions, which argue that the Robinsonade is an anachronistic, imperial form unsuited for such critiques. Rather than bolstering the imperial policies of their respective nations, as the use of the Robinsonade form might at first suggest, I conclude that O’Dell and Tournier re-imagine the formal constraints of the Robinsonade and construct in their respective texts a vision of a post-imperial world that runs counter to the national narratives of both the United States and France at the time of these books’ publication.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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