Western Desert Island Novel Typical Text

The western desert island novel is an unique art achievement in literature world, especially rich in England, France, America and New zealand. Desert island novel has undergone a gradual process of origination, maturity and development, and it emerges a numerous and substantial text-group step by step in literature history. Because of the large quantity of western desert island novels, as well as the intercross with the other subjects, so it will be a feasible way to do research by choosing some typical texts, then this dissertation focuses on the following eight typical texts:Daniel Defoe's《Robinson Crusoe》,R.M.Ballantyne's《The Coral Island》,William Golding's《Lord of the Flies》,Jules Verne's《The Mysterious Island》and《Two Year's Vacation》,Scott O'Dell's《Island of the Blue Dolphins》,Alex Garland's《The Beach》and Tom Neale's《An Island To Oneself》.This dissertation has four main parts.The first chapter is about the emergence and development of desert island novels. At the beginning of this part, it gives a conception of"desert island", and focuses on the geographical reasons and social reasons of the emergence of western desert island novels, and then it sorts out a clear order of desert island novels by nations and times. The emergence and development of desert island novels have a close relationship with the geographical locations and national characteristics of island countries, it shows that people want to explore unknown world. At the same time, the creation of desert island novels has a relationship with the writing and life experience of the authors.The second chapter is about the construction of space. This part focuses on the special space of"desert island", and it studies on three levels: the first is how the authors construct the desert island space; the second is what is the function to the characters by constructing the space; the third is the relationship between constructiong space and the themes of these works.There are three characteristics of constructing space: defamiliarization, idealization, abstraction.Defamiliarization first means the authors intentionally choose desert islands which people don't get familiar with as main space for the action of dramatis personae, and second it means the authors intertionally highlight the strangeness of desert island to dramatis personae. This defamiliarization is able to provide some unknown field to the characters in novels in order to illuminate the themes of exploration and enterprise. As for readers, it also adds aesthetic sentiment. The latter can be proved by Shklovskil (ИосифСамиловичШкловский)'s defamiliarization theory. Shklovskij emphasizes the transformation from"familiarity"to"defamiliarity", and this way is good to bring out some new creation, and is beneficial to eliminating aesthetic fatigue. This has some similarity with the saying that distance creates beauty. While as for desert island, it has much more"defamiliarity"than"familiarity", and it has a lot of novelty and mystery, if the authors do more to highlight its defamiliarity, then, no matter to these characters, or to readers, it is a intense summon of exploration.Idealization means authors intentionally to describe the desert island to be a Xanadu. The 16 century English writer Thomas More made up an ideal society in his work Utopia, but in real life, there is no this kind of society, then the desert island authors just put this ideal social form. This idealization provides a gist for social criticism by the characters in the novels, at the same time it shows the theme of longing the ideal society.Abstraction is the third characteristics of space construction of desert island. It means in novels, desert island is not a concrete existence, in other words, it can be any spacial existence. The purpose of abstraction is to provide a space which can be either realistic ro allegoric to dramatis personaes in novels, and then to inspire characters or readers to make a profound philosophic thought.The third chapter studies on the intertextuality of desert island novels. This part bases on intertextuality theory, and analyses the intertextual relationship between these works, either dominant intertextuality or recessive intertextuality. Meanwhile, there concludes three important intertextual characteristics of desert island text-group: the resemblance of plot construction, the imitation of characters setting-up, and the inset of classical original images.The last chapter is research on ecological ethics of desert island novels. At the beginning it dissertates the reasons why there is a serious unbalance between male and female characters in desert island novels, and it researches more on the scarcity of female characters. And then it will use ecological theory to explore multi-dimensionally the relationship between human beings and entironment according to these desert island novels.