Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4884-9065
Abstract
Informed by critical island studies, loneliness studies and posthumanist thought, with a particular emphasis on Rosi Braidotti’s propositions of affirmative ethics and zoe, this study focuses on children’s Robinsonades, specifically Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960) and Peter Brown’s The Wild Robot (2016), to examine how the isolation setting intensifies characters’ experiences of loneliness in a productive tension with the island’s abundant ecological responsiveness. It delves into the shift in loneliness from negative to affirmative, and its narrative potential for crafting a posthuman condition in which the recognition of zoe elicits post-anthropocentric relations. Through intersectional theoretical lenses, loneliness is reconceived as a generative force in the interplay between survival skills, relational entanglements, and ethical transformations, all of which are incrementally necessitated by a growing consciousness of the agential forces of the wider ecological web of island life. As child protagonists evolve into neo-Crusoes on increasingly posthumanized islands, foregrounding the affirmative ethics of loneliness clarifies how the Robinsonade genre nurtures and orients post-anthropocentric relations towards more-than-human horizons of hope.
Recommended Citation
You, Chengcheng
(2026)
"Post-anthropocentric Relations Unbound: Affirmative Ethics of Loneliness in Children’s Robinsonades,"
Kritika Kultura:
No.
49, Article 21.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13185/1656-152X.2260
Available at:
https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss49/21
