Survival Narratives in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi: An Intertextual Dialogic and Cultural Materialist Study
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Date
2019
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Publisher
UNIVERSITE MOULOUD MAMMERI TIZI-OUZOU
Abstract
The present work studies all of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Jules Verne’s The
Mysterious Island (1874) and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001) from both an Intertextual
Dialogic and a Cultural Materialist approach. The purpose of this dissertation is, on the one
hand, to draw parallels and direct comparison between Defoe’s source text and Verne’s
literary adaptation and, on the other hand, to discuss the marked differences between Defoe’s
masterpiece and Martel’s narrative. The main focus of this dissertation is to analyse the
evolution of the Robinsonade genre through evaluating the change witnessed in its
perspectives and ideologies. To achieve this goal, this work will be based on Bakhtin’s two
prominent concepts of ‘Stylization’ and ‘Polemic’ combined with his “Dialogism” developed
in his books entitled The Dialogic Imagination (1981) and Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics
(1984). Furthermore, we will also adopt and explore Raymond Williams’s theory of Cultural
Materialism particularly his concepts of ‘Residual’, ‘Dominant’ and ‘Emergent’ ideologies of
culture which he introduced in his two books entitled Marxism and Literature (1977) and
Culture and Materialism (1980). Our analysis of the three novels under scrutiny shows that
Verne’s The Mysterious Island is, to a certain degree, a stylization of Defoe’s classical
Robinsonade, while Martel’s modern and contemporary novel might be read as an overt
polemic directed at Defoe’s canonical work. Additionally, our study reveals that each novel
portrays different ideologies which are developing through time and adapting to new changes
depending on the author’ s ideological stance as well as novel’s settings
Description
30cm.; 77p.+cd
Keywords
Robinson Crusoe, The Mysterious Island, Life of Pi, Intertextuality, Dialogism, Stylization, Polemic, Ideology, Residual, Dominant, Emergent
Citation
Literature and Civilisation