"Defoe's chorography and geography in The Tour and Robinson Crusoe: an ecocritical reading of Defoe's spatial and environmental imagination"
type: Dataset
description: Defoe's handling of space and land is crucial to his travel narratives, especially the Tour and Robinson Crusoe. Robinson turns the land of his uncharted island into an object that he can control, enclose and develop. Nature, initially associated to a hostile force epitomized in the storm that led him to this island, becomes a source of possibilities that Robinson discovers as he restructures and mentally maps that natural space to make it his own place or dwelling. In the Tour, Defoe narrates the English space through verbal cartography, chorography and fiction, analysing the big picture and the small picture (by varying scales), the ways in which human nature inscribes itself in non-human nature, the relationship between the local and the global, between the country and the city. It is through his geographical and environmental imagination that Defoe manages to give the most graphic contemporary account of the state of Great-Britain in the first part of the eighteenth century. Both texts show a process of appropriation of space and nature by the traveller in order to promote it economically and geopolitically. It is this interaction between the traveller and the environment around him that this ecocritical reading of Defoe wants to analyse.
landing page: " The Culture of Grub Street "
keyword: chorography
keyword: conference-papers
keyword: defoe
keyword: ecocriticism
keyword: geography
keyword: infoeu-reposemanticsconferenceobject
keyword: literature
keyword: shslitthumanities-and-social-sciencesliterature
issued: 2026-05-09T22:47:47.448542
modified: 2026-05-09T22:47:47.448546
language: en
contact point: Organization
  fn: CCSD

test_moissonnage_selune
type: Agent

"Defoe's chorography and geography in The Tour and Robinson Crusoe: an ecocritical reading of Defoe's spatial and environmental imagination"
type: Distribution
format: HTML
access URL: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00856378
issued: 2026-05-09T22:47:47.449681
modified: 2026-05-09T22:47:47.439817