Abstract.....................................................................I
Key Words....................................................................I
摘要.........................................................................II
关键词.......................................................................II
Introduction.................................................................1
I. Colonial Discourses.......................................................2
A. Master and Slave..........................................................2
1. Selling Xury and Buying Black Slaves to Work for His Plantation...........3
2. Enslaving the Savage—Friday...........................................3
3. The History of Evil Slave Deal and Slavery System.........................5
B. The Superior Race and the Inferior Race...................................6
1. The Just and Kind White. .................................................6
2. The Ugly Black along the African Coast....................................8
3. The Cruel Cannibals—the American Indians..............................9
II. Cultural Colonization: Bringing Civilization to the Savage—Friday.......10
A. Changing Their Primitive Life Style Into an Easier Life...................10
1. Getting Rid of the Habit of Man-eating....................................11
2. Making Clothes for Friday..............................................11
3. Instructing Friday to Use Tools and Arms..................................12
B. Banishing Friday’s Language and Instructing English to Him...............13
C. Mocking Friday’s God and Instructing the Real God to Him.................13
III. The Dilemma of Losing His National Culture Identity.....................15
Conclusion...................................................................16
Acknowledgements.............................................................17
Bibliography.................................................................18
Abstract
Daniel Defoe is a great English novelist in the18th century. Robinson Crusoe, his masterpiece, is either a pioneering English adventure fiction or a typical colonial literature. It not only is a vivid narrative story about the surprising and adventuring life of Robinson, but also has the theme of colonism which is represented on a series of binary oppositional colonial discourses: the colonial country and the colony, master and slave, the white and the colored, central culture and marginal culture, civilization and savageness, Christianity and cannibals and all that. With post-colonial criticism as its visual angle, this thesis sets on the history of European colonialism, analyzes the description of characters, narrative words and the growing process of “Friday” who loses his national culture identity to deconstruct those colonial discourses, explores the strategies for colonist’s cultural colonization to those people in the colonies and reveals the dilemma of losing their national culture identity. This analysis gives us a new perspective in appreciation this classical work and a typical case study of how the colonists exert the cultural rule on the people in the colonies.
Key Words
Robinson Crusoe; colonialism; colonial discourses; cultural colonization
