On Continuation And Breakthrough Of Desert Island Literature In The Island

Victoria Hislop, a famous British writer, has set up her own special column in Sunday Telegraph, Daily Telegraph, Woman & Home, etc. in her early years and gained a high reputation from her elegant and graceful style of writing and affecting stories. Therefore, she has also been known as the "famous writer without any famous works".Her novel The Island (2005), which was considered as "the new Captain Corelli’s Mandolin", was one of the bestsellers in Britain.As the maiden work of Victoria Hislop, The Island has gained a great fame once it was published. The fiction has taken the ever-prevailing leprosy as the main line, telling a family story derived from heroine Alexis’experience of exploring her identity by looking through her mother Sophia’s past. From one side, the story tells the process of the whole family’s suffering from the prevailing leprosy, accepting and facing the facts, taking efforts to solve the problem, and successfully escaping the isolated island; from the other side, it is also a story of Sophia’s exploring through her family history and herself as well, growing in overcoming difficulties, getting on power spiritly, accepting herself, finishing the disintegration of her life, and finally find the real herself.Based on The Island by Victoria Hislop, a Britain female writer, this thesis mainly analyzes the development of British desert island literature. By the comparison with some of the traditional desert island literary works, such as Robinson Crusoe and the Lord of the Flies, the thesis explores The Island’s continuation and breakthrough to traditional British desert island literature from the respects of theme and absence of women in the work.The thesis is divided into three parts. The first part is the introduction which mainly introduces the writer of The Island, her writing style, and the idea of The Island’s continuation and breakthrough to the traditional island literature. The second part is the main body that contains three chapters discussing The Island’s continuation and breakthrough to traditional desert island literature and its significance. With the third part, the author summarizes the main idea of the thesis.The first chapter of the thesis mainly analyzes the origin and features of the traditional British desert island literature and the traditional features in The Island. By the comparison with the typical British island literary works, such as Robinson Crusoe and Lord of the Flies, the author of the thesis believes that The Island has carried on some of the traditional features of British desert island literature even though it has overturned some of them in a certain way. The second chapter of the thesis analyzes The Island’s breakthrough to the traditional desert island literature. The Island has got rid of the single theme of typical works and adopted multiple themes to describe people’s living conditions under the background of prevalent leprosy. In addition, The Island tends to create more realistic characters instead of the allegory ones. The third chapter of the thesis analyzes the significance of The Island’s breakthrough to traditional British desert island literature from the respect of female absence in literary works of this type. Even following the analytical method by predecessors, this thesis with original and innovative ideas, is designed to fully analyze and interpret The Island from the respects of the theme and the absence of women, and specifically demonstrate its continuation and breakthrough to typical British desert island literature by comparison with traditional desert island literary works.The analysis to The Island in the thesis has taken on original point of view. It is based on The Island’s continuation and breakthrough to the traditional desert island literature, and specifically explains The Island’s continuation of the writing features of traditional desert island literary works and its major breakthrough to the absence of women in literary works of this type.The author tried to explore the relationship between The Island and traditional island literature from the perspective of continuation and breakthrough. As a junior in the field of desert island literature, the author knows that the thesis still needs to be refined, and criticism and comments from all scholars with remarkable achievements in this field are welcomed.