Anne Birgitte Rønning
Female robinsonades: adventures of shipwreck and good behaviour
Abstract
The immediate and immense success of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in 1719 gave rise to a flow of new publications, and in the following centuries hundreds of robinsonades were published. Most of them were written by male authors and told the stories of male shipwrecked on a desert island. However, the robinsonade is not that unigendered as canonical literary history seems to imply. Women wrote, read and translated castaway stories, and there were stories of female Robinson Crusoes. The lecture will present some of these female robinsonades, focusing on why women were attired by the genre both as as writers and readers, and on how female castaways were presented in their struggle for survival.
SvD, 30 May 2013
- Conferences and activities > COST meetings > Final COST-WWIH conference June 2013 > Robinsonades