"Defoe's chorography and geography in The Tour and Robinson Crusoe: an ecocritical reading of Defoe's spatial and environmental imagination"
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.