What does the story of Robinson Crusoe have to do with understanding past and present women’s lives? The Female Crusoe: Hybridity, Trade and the Eighteenth-Century Individual investigates the possibility that Daniel Defoe’s famous work was informed by qualities attributed to trade, luxury and credit and described as feminine in the period. In this volume, Robinson Crusoe and the female castaway narratives published in its wake emerge as texts of social criticism that draw on neglected values of race and gender to challenge the dominant values of society. Such narratives worked to establish status and authority for marginalised characters and subjects who were as different, and as similar, as Defoe’s gentleman-tradesman and Wollstonecraft’s independent woman. The Female Crusoe goes on to address the twentieth-century engagement with the castaway tale, showing how three contemporary authors, in their complex and gendered negotiations of power and identity, echo, even while they challenge, the concerns of their eighteenth-century predecessors. This work will be of interest to students interested in literary engagements with individualism and women’s rights in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.
Owen
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Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Critical Fortunes of Robinson Crusoe
Crusoe and the “Female Goddesses of Disorder”
Credit, Virginity and the Cannibal-consumer
The Social Contract and the Widow
The Female Castaway as Translator
The Virginal Individual
Mothers and Daughters of the New World
Female Sexual Desire and Independence
Crusoe and Modern Woman
Bibliography
Index
C.M. Owen lectures in the English program at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Murdoch University in Western Australia and is a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne.
