Document Type : Research Paper
Author
Assistant Professor, Department of Foreign Languages, Language Center, Imam Sadiq University, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
At the beginning of the 18th century, with the act of the parliaments of England and Scotland, the four countries of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland were formed the Great Britain, and the British identity was added to the people of these countries. Travelogue writing has been very important among nations since long ago. Many historians carefully examined the travelogues to learn about the native culture of other countries. Generally, the analysis of travelogues leads to the understanding of the hidden layers of different societies, which may not be easily understood and counted in historical books. Examining historical and political discourses is one of the issues that many researchers focused on colonial culture pursue in travelogues. Along with this union and with the advancement of sciences, the British took the first steps to become a colonial power. But in the first place, it was necessary to form the idea of empire in the minds of the British; Therefore, English authors and travel writers started to compose works whose themes were the discovery of distant lands, colonization and confrontation with the natives. One of these people was Daniel Defoe, who in his novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), which is one of the texts subject to reading in the course Novel 1, B.A. in English Language and Literature in Iran, depicted the adventures of Robinson Crusoe. In the novel, he managed not only to establish a colony for himself and achieved great wealth, but also became a slave owner in Latin America in the cotton fields. Although the current novel has been of great interest to those interested in fiction and colonial literature, a descriptive and analytical review can show wider aspects of this novel to the audience. Therefore, this research aims to analyze the above novel in light of postcolonial criticism to reveal the colonial discourse in the work, that is, the conquest of the natives and their reduction to others and colonial subjects. In other words, the research shows that otherness has been the focus of Defoe's work which can pave the way for researchers to decode hidden aspects in the aforementioned novel.
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