SOURCE: "J. M. Coetzee's Dusklands: Colonial Encounters of the Robinsonian Kind," in World Literature Written in English, Vol. 27, No. 2, Autumn, 1987, pp. 174-84.

In the following essay, Gardiner explores the ways in which Coetzee's novella "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee" resembles Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe in its textual codification of European imperialism.

Although post-colonial criticism has been primarily concerned with comparisons between the various post-colonial literatures, it has recently turned to establishing crucial differences between particular texts and their European analogues. The works of Cape Town author and scholar J. M. Coetzee have all subversively inscribed Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe with the deliberate aim of rejecting its canonical formulation of the colonial encounter. Coetzee's longstanding interest in Robinson Crusoe is overtly declared in his latest novel, where the connections between his work and "De/Foe's" themselves become the subject of the text. Entitled Foe, it is set on...