Robinson Crusoe is an English adventure novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719. Written with a combination of Epistolary, confessional, and didactic forms, the book follows the title character after he is cast away and spends 28 years on a remote tropical desert island near the coasts of Venezuela and Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. The story has been thought to be based on the life of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who lived for four years on a Pacific island called "Más a Tierra" which was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966. Pedro Serrano is another real-life castaway whose story might have inspired the novel.
Robert Michael Ballantyne was a Scottish author of juvenile fiction, who wrote more than a hundred books. He was also an accomplished artist: he exhibited some of his water-colours at the Royal Scottish Academy.
Naturalism is a literary movement beginning in the late nineteenth century, similar to literary realism in its rejection of Romanticism, but distinct in its embrace of determinism, detachment, scientific objectivism, and social commentary. Literary naturalism emphasizes observation and the scientific method in the fictional portrayal of reality. Naturalism includes detachment, in which the author maintains an impersonal tone and disinterested point of view; determinism, which is defined as the opposite of free will, in which a character's fate has been decided, even predetermined, by impersonal forces of nature beyond human control; and a sense that the universe itself is indifferent to human life. The novel would be an experiment where the author could discover and analyze the forces, or scientific laws, that influenced behavior, and these included emotion, heredity, and environment. The movement largely traces to the theories of French author Émile Zola.
Lassie is a fictional female Rough Collie dog and is featured in a 1938 short story by Eric Knight that was later expanded to a 1940 full-length novel, Lassie Come-Home. Knight's portrayal of Lassie bears some features in common with another fictional female collie of the same name, featured in the British writer Elizabeth Gaskell's 1859 short story "The Half Brothers". In "The Half Brothers", Lassie is loved only by her young master and guides the adults back to where two boys are lost in a snowstorm.
The Swiss Family Robinson is a novel by the Swiss author Johann David Wyss, first published in 1812, about a Swiss family of immigrants whose ship en route to Port Jackson, Australia, goes off course and is shipwrecked in the East Indies. The ship's crew is lost, but the family and several domestic animals survive. They make their way to shore, where they build a settlement, undergoing several adventures before being rescued; some refuse rescue and remain on the island.
The Adventures of Gulliver is a 1968 television cartoon produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions. The show is loosely based on the 1726 satirical novel Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. The show aired Saturday mornings on ABC-TV and lasted for one season in its original broadcast. Flirtacia appeared in the third season of Jellystone!.
Rebecca Blaine Harding Davis was an American author and journalist. She was a pioneer of literary realism in American literature. She graduated valedictorian from Washington Female Seminary in Pennsylvania. Her most important literary work is the short story "Life in the Iron-Mills," published in the April 1861 edition of The Atlantic Monthly. Throughout her lifetime, Davis sought to effect social change for African Americans, women, Native Americans, immigrants, and the working class, by intentionally writing about the plight of these marginalized groups in the 19th century.
Daniel Pratt Mannix IV was an American writer, journalist, photographer, sideshow performer, stage magician, animal trainer, and filmmaker. One of his two best-known works is the 1958 book Those About to Die, which was inspiration for the Ridley Scott film Gladiator in 2000 and the upcoming TV drama Those About to Die on Peacock. The other is the 1967 novel The Fox and the Hound, which was loosely adapted into an animated feature film by Walt Disney Productions in 1981.
A castaway is a person who is cast adrift or ashore. While the situation usually happens after a shipwreck, some people voluntarily stay behind on a desert island, either to evade captors or the world in general. A person may also be left ashore as punishment (marooned).
The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean (1857) is a novel written by Scottish author R. M. Ballantyne. One of the first works of juvenile fiction to feature exclusively juvenile heroes, the story relates the adventures of three boys marooned on a South Pacific island, the only survivors of a shipwreck.
Agatha Christie: And Then There Were None is a 2005 point-and-click adventure game developed by AWE Productions and published by The Adventure Company for Microsoft Windows. It was the first in The Adventure Company's Agatha Christie series. The game is a detective murder-mystery; it begins with nine people, including Patrick Narracott, the playable character, who meet and journey to the fictional Shipwreck (Soldier) Island. There, two additional onscreen characters are introduced, and the story then follows the events that unfold.
Moelona was the pen-name of Elizabeth (Lizzie) Mary Jones, a Welsh novelist and translator who wrote novels for children and other works in Welsh.
The Pirate is one of the Waverley novels by Sir Walter Scott, based roughly on the life of John Gow who features as Captain Cleveland. The setting is the southern tip of the main island of Shetland, towards the end of the 17th century, with 1689 as the likely date of the main incidents.
Literary realism is a literary genre, part of the broader realism in arts, that attempts to represent subject-matter truthfully, avoiding speculative fiction and supernatural elements. It originated with the realist art movement that began with mid-nineteenth-century French literature (Stendhal) and Russian literature. Literary realism attempts to represent familiar things as they are. Realist authors chose to depict every day and banal activities and experiences.
Spanish Realist literature is the literature written in Spain during the second half of the 19th century, following the Realist movement which predominated in Europe.
Les Sœurs Vatard is a novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, first published in 1879. It was the author's second novel. His first, Marthe (1876), had earned the praise of Émile Zola and Huysmans had come to be associated with the older author and his Naturalist school of fiction. Les Sœurs Vatard shows the clear influence of Naturalism, being a realistic depiction of working-class life based on meticulous documentation.
Policeman Bluejay or Babes in Birdland is a children's novel written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by Maginel Wright Enright. First published in 1907, Jack Snow considered it one of the best of Baum's works.
The Gorilla Hunters: A Tale of the Wilds of Africa (1861) is a boys' adventure novel by Scottish author R. M. Ballantyne. A sequel to his hugely successful 1858 novel The Coral Island and set in "darkest Africa", its main characters are the earlier novel's three boys: Ralph, Peterkin and Jack. The book's themes are similar to those of The Coral Island, in which the boys testify to the positive influence of missionary work among the natives. Central in the novel is the hunt for gorillas, an animal until recently unknown to the Western world, which came to play an important role in contemporary debates on evolution and the relation between white Westerners and Africans.
The Island Queen: or Dethroned by Fire and Water: a tale of the Southern Hemisphere (1885) is a novel written by Scottish author R.M. Ballantyne. The novel first appeared in Volume VI of Young England, an annual magazine published in London from 1880 to 1937. It was then published in paperback by J. Nisbet & Co. This novel was Ballantyne's 79th publication, written in the latter half of his career.
