Other Islands, Other Deserts
The Negative Turn of Uninhabited Spaces
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35699/2317-2096.2021.26288Keywords:
dystopia, post-apocalyptic narratives , Robinson Crusoe , The Island of Dr. Moreau , The RoadAbstract
The uninhabited space plays an important role in the modern imagination. Its fascination derives from the wonder felt by the first Europeans to travel to the New World, and it finds one of its most paradigmatical expressions in Robinson Crusoe’s desert island. Originally a place of abundance where the individual found an apparently unlimited opportunity to expand, it surfaces again towards the end of the nineteenth century as a dark and controlled territory with dystopian traits. In this article I discuss the ways this negative turn of the uninhabited space takes place, first in H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), and then in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road (2006). In this way I intend to show how the image of the uninhabited space has been represented in differed moments of modernity, and how it is connected to the way we think our position in the world.
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