Imagined Places: Robinson Crusoe and Elizabeth Bishop

This paper explores representations of geographical displacement in the work of American poet Elizabeth Bishop in relation to ideas of imagined places and an imaginary "home." It focuses on Bishop's late poem "Crusoe in England," in which she offers a revisionary account of one of the prime European travel narratives, and it compares Bishop's Crusoe to those of Caribbean poet Derek Walcott's "Crusoe Island" and South African J. M. Coetzee's Foe, mapping how by rediscovering Crusoe, out of a profound experience of multiple displacement, the writers discover many ways of writing home.