Celia Torke
Die Robinsonin
Repräsentationen von Weiblichkeit in deutsch- und englischsprachigen Robinsonaden des 20. Jahrhunderts
1. Edition 2011
326 pages
ISBN 978-3-89971-667-2
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Robinson Crusoe as he is commonly known is a man. He is a strong symbol of triumph of man over nature, fear, failure as well as of white male authority. In contrast, female robinson figures have hardly ever been recognized. If at all, the robinsonetta has been regarded as ›other‹. She is an odd variation within a long and outstanding literary tradition.
This book tries to show how inadequate this notion is from a postmodernistic perspective. Taken into account a great amount of robinson tales focussing on female castaways, telling the Crusoe myth from a female point of view, the existing definition and understanding of the robinson genre does not prove satisfactory any longer.
In a conflicting interplay between a powerful literary tradition and strong innovative movements, between continuity and change, intertextual references and independent self-creation the four rewritings of Gerhart Hauptmann, Muriel Spark, Marlen Haushofer and J.M. Coetzee ask us to see the genre from a new and different point of view and to undertake a self-critical revision of robinson-specific canon.