Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

“Robinson Crusoe,” a novel by Daniel Defoe, is about an English castaway who spent twenty-eight years on a remote tropical island near Venezuela. Robinson Crusoe, the hero in the novel, was born and grew up in a middle-class family and he would live in peace if he followed his father’s advice and studied law. However, he ignored his father’s wishes, ran off to sea, and started his own adventure. From then on he experienced a big movement and transformation of space, from a familiar world to a strange one, from the world of his own to the world of others. Most importantly, it was a transformation from the space defined and created by his father to the one that was uncertain and to be constructed by himself; and the transformation and construction of space contributed to his self-fashion as a subject. This paper discusses how Robinson Crusoe constructed his space on the island and how the construction led to his self-fashioning.