Table Of ContentPROBLEMATIC SHORES: THE LITERATURE OF
ISLANDS
Also by Diana Loxley
THE POLITICS OF THEORY (co-editor)
CONFRONTING THE CRISIS: WAR POLITICS AND CULTURE
IN THE EIGHTIES (co-editor)
EUROPE AND ITS OTHERS (co-editor)
LITERATURE, POLITICS AND THEORY (co-editor)
Problematic Shores:
The Literature of
Islands
Diana Loxley
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-10812-1 ISBN 978-1-349-10810-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-10810-7
© Diana Loxley 1990
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1990 978-0-333-49111-9
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1990
ISBN 978-0-312-04026-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Loxley, Diana, 1957-
Problematic shores : the literature of islands : discourses of
nineteenth-century imperial ideology / Diana Loxley.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-312-04026-0
1. English fiction -19th century - History and criticism.
2. Islands in literature. 3. Colonies in literature.
4. Imperialism in literature. 5. Defoe, Daniel, 1661?-1731.
Robinson Crusoe. 6. Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1850-1894. Treasure
Island. 7. Verne, Jules, 1828-1905-Criticism and interpretation.
I. Title.
PR830.I75L69 1990
809.3'9372 - dc20 89-24086
CIP
For Alison, Colin, Harriet and Tom
Contents
~if~~~ ~
Acknowledgements ix
Preface xi
Introduction 1
1. The Latitudes of Empire: Jules Verne's Mysterious Islands 15
2. Islands of Civility, Seas of Savagery 73
3. 'Slaves to Adventure': The Pure Story of Treasure Island 129
Afterword 170
Notes and References 172
Bibliography 183
Index 191
vii
List of Illustrations
1. John Everett Millais, Bt (1829-96), The Boyhood of
Raleigh [Courtesy of the Tate Gallery]. xii
2. 'The Mysterious Island', illustration from The Boy's
Own Paper, Vol. V, No. 217, 10 March 1883, p.372
[Courtesy of the Bodleian Library]. 14
3. 'Poor, But Happy!', illustration from The Boy's Own
Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 317, 7 February 1885, p.301
[Courtesy of the Bodleian Library]. 72
4. 'I was kept busy all day in the cave, packing the minted
money into bread-bags', illustration from Treasure
Island, Robert Louis Stevenson, 1885, p.285
[Courtesy of the Bodleian Library]. 128
viii
Acknowledgement s
For their considerable help over the years, I thank Dorothy Gibson
and Sylvia Sparrow in the Department of Literature at the Univer
sity of Essex and Terry Tostevin in the Library of the same
university .
Many people have contributed in various ways to the writing of
this. But I would like to thank, in particular, Marijn Barker, Pat
Campbell, Jude Ellis, Mary Ferrill, Jane Heath, Celia Hirst, Claire
Hobbs, Margaret Iversen, Martin Macaulay, Marianne Majerus,
Mitch Stuart, Lesley Theophilus and Sissy Velissariou. I gratefully
acknowledge the critical comments of Elaine Jordan and Peter
Widdowson.
The intellectual production of this book is greatly indebted to
Francis Barker, Jane Heath and Peter Hulme whose sustained
encouragement, support and patience made its completion possi
ble. Thanks are not enough, but I thank them for everything
nevertheless.
The author and publishers wish to acknowledge the following:
Airmont Publishing Company, New York, for permission to quote
extracts from The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne (1965);
Morton Cohen, for permission to quote extracts from 'The ever
open dead man's chest' in the Guardian (19 November 1983);
J. M. Dent & Sons, and Everyman's Library, for permission to
quote extracts from The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann Wyss
(1910) and from Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
(1977);
Jacqueline Rose and Macmillan Press for permission to quote
extracts from The Case of Peter Pan (1984).
Every effort has been made to trace all sources and to seek
permission to reproduce texts. Any further information will be
gratefully received and acted upon.
ix
Preface
This book examines the centrality of the topos of the island in
nineteenth-century literature as it coincides with the era of high
imperialism in Britain and its ideological consolidation within
colonial, political, cultural and educational discourses of the age.
Within the context of the development of a fully-fledged imperial
ideology, the importance of the centrality of this topos is charted
through analysis of five texts: Verne's The Mysterious Island [1875]
(Chapter 1), Wyss's The Swiss Family Robinson [1800], Marryat's
Masterman Ready [1841], Ballantyne's The Coral Island [1858] (Chap
ter 2), and Stevenson's Treasure Island [1883] (Chapter 3). The
significance of the island motif is examined at the level of its
institutionalisation as an ideal discourse - guaranteed by the state
and embedded in the educational apparatus - whose nuanced
negotiation of the relationship between Britain and the outside
world provides a model formula for the assimilation of the language
of conquest, masculinity, supremacy and authority and also of the
supposedly inherent, eternal values of that language.
Defoe's Robinson Crusoe emerges as a pivotal text within this
particular discursive formation and the book addresses itself to an
understanding of its implicit legacy, on the way it has been
rewritten and variously used and the importance attributed to the
history of its meanings and motifs. In its analyses of the
nineteenth-century reworkings of the core narrative of Robinson
Crusoe, this book shows how the major ideological themes of
British colonialism and imperialism are rearticulated in these five
texts in ways that can be related to significant stages in the elaboration
of the colonial enterprise. The motif of the island cannot simply be
understood as just another 'theme' that variously appears and
reappears throughout British and European literary history. It is not,
therefore, an arbitrary choosing of one specific strand in literature, the
historical persistence of which alone might justify its examination.
What, on the contrary, is being proposed is that the texts examined
must be seen not simply as variations on a theme but, in essence,
literary representations of the theme of British colonialism.
DL
London
xi
