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The boys' adventure story is perhaps the genre that seems least likely to invite child readers to dodge rather than succumb to adult authority, since such stories often strive to brainwash boys into committing themselves to the imperialist cause. Chapter 2 argues that Treasure Island, long accepted as an exemplary text in this regard, actually functions as an anti-adventure story, inciting child readers to see through the seductive propaganda of typical desert island romances. Like Ewing, Robert Louis Stevenson portrays the project of draining foreign lands of riches as traumatizing and morally problematic. At the same time, he exposes flattery as the key narrative technique adult storytellers employ to seduce children into embracing the project of empire-building. Thus, the duplicitous Long John Silver butters up Jim Hawkins using the very same techniques employed by writers like W. H. G. Kingston and R. M. Ballantyne: addressing the boy as an equal, promising to tell him the truth, and portraying him as an invaluable collaborator in the project of subduing foreign lands. Treasure Island warns children to beware of the treachery of such silver-tongued adult storytellers.

This chapter discusses an argument that we should nevertheless be committed to equal property rights in external resources, on account of our (broadly liberal) commitment to freedom as a fundamental value. In order to demonstrate the problem with this argument, we have to return to the original egalitarian Robinsonade that was invoked to make the case for basic income.

This chapter reconsiders literary didacticism by demonstrating the ways in which the Robinsonade novel for young readers has evolved from the anxious moralizing of earlier examples into a more socially instructive vehicle for engaging young readers with contemporary socio-political and cultural issues, such as gender politics and global post-colonial concerns. Unlike much scholarly material on the Robinsonade genre, which tends to concentrate on texts produced during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the focus of this chapter is on post-1900 works of Robinsonade fiction. The chapter also embraces a much wider definition of what has historically been understood within the Robinsonade as an ‘island’ or ‘islanded’ location.

This chapter considers William Payne’s 1912 novel Three Boys in Antarctica in light of the Robinsonade genre - in particular as an example of a text which relocates the tropical desert-island setting to the icy world of the Antarctic. It argues that, while the story does contain some traditional elements of the Robinsonade narrative, the Antarctic setting has a significant impact on the text’s underlying didactics. The chapter also argues for the importance of spatial considerations within the Robinsonade genre and offers a reconsideration of the traditional topography of the genre, underlining the significant relationship between the space of the text and the characters who inhabit it. Instead of celebrating the adventuring spirit of the traditional Robinsonades, the chapter concludes that Payne’s tale is a cautionary one, and one which seeks to undo the political heritage of the Robinsonade genre at large.

This chapter argues that The Dreams of Myfanwy, written by Welsh writer Moelona and concerned with the experiences of the female author writing in a minority language, negotiates an intriguing relationship with, and offers perspective on, the patriarchal, imperial ideologies traditionally associated with imitations of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The chapter contends that the didactic impulse of this particular Robinsonade is to inculcate within its young readers a sense of Welsh national and cultural difference; like many other popular adventure novels written in Welsh from the 1910s to the 1930s, Moelona’s novel is specifically designed to entice readers and to instil a sense of pride in their cultural and linguistic distinctiveness. The chapter concludes by arguing that this text is a teaching tool that embodies the tension between creativity and didacticism, and which ultimately allows its young readers to navigate an understanding of what it meant to be a young Welsh adolescent in early 20th-century Britain.

This chapter argues that Armstrong Sperry’s Call it Courage cannot be considered a revisionist work of Robinsonade fiction (as it is sometimes interpreted) and that discussions of it in terms of postcolonial or feminist theoretical frameworks are limited precisely because of the text’s spurious ethnography. It also argue that Call it Courage is a particularly important example of a work of Robinsonade fiction whose didactic merit, ideological significance, and perceived value for young readers has changed over time. Ultimately, the chapter argues that Sperry’s narrative is a regenerated imperial Robinsonade in the guise of an indigenous Pacific Island tale, and that there is much to be suspicious of in the novel’s continued placement on North American school curricula.

This chapter contends that Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins and Michel Tournier’s Friday and Robinson are works of didactic fiction which pose to young readers questions of historical, political, and cultural concern and, moreover, which allow for readers to develop their own critical skills in response to such concerns. It also argue that, through the highlighting of reasoned debate, forced shifts in perspective, and a playful exposure of received social laws, both Island of the Blue Dolphins and Friday and Robinson are examples of educational literature par excellence, precisely because they engender within the reader the ability to critically analyse, interpret, and independently draw conclusions from the texts’ events.

This chapter argues that Libba Bray’s Beauty Queens, a satirical riposte to the Robinsonade genre, draws on the broad tradition of codifying the desert island as a space for romantic interludes and posits the island as a distinctly experimental site for girls to navigate gendered behaviours, in order that they might question conservative social mores concerning female sexuality. It also argues for a critical perspective that reclaims women’s connection to nature by reconsidering the cultural construction of “woman” as one that is potentially transgressive within the narrative, and it schools young readers in finding pleasure in their own bodily, sexual desires.

To early filmmakers, Jules Verne was not only a legend but also a contemporary author of international repute. The author’s own stage versions of Around the World in Eighty Days, The Children of Captain Grant, and Michael Strogoff had been immediately translated for the English-language theater, and an assortment of other playwrights composed their own unauthorized versions. Hence, Verne was familiar to both readers and theater-going audiences, and the first films made from his stories drew on their respective stage background. By 1916, modern special effects (as opposed to Georges Méliès’s trick films) began to emerge with the first blockbuster fiction film to utilize undersea photography, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, an adaptation of two Verne novels that was also timely because of the submarine warfare of World War I.

This chapter turn sattention to the shrinking territory young people are permitted to roam in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, due to protection is teliding of participation. "Islanding" in 1920s and 1930s comic strips and later Robins on adesis contextualized with in analysis of protections. By the twenty-first century the sentimentalized suppression of youth was fascinatingly demonstrated by the popularity and corporate sponsorship of competitive teensailors attempting global circumnavigation, as well as a corresponding protectionist legal and media backlash. In the failure of Abby Sunder land's global venture (with much parent-blaming) and Laura Dekker's success (inspite of immensepersecution from child protectionists), the author considers these subtler consequences of protectionist premises.

Chapter 9, “The Rules of Capitalism,” outlines five “rules” of capitalism as strong tendencies or gravitational forces of a capitalist social order. Like all rules, the rules of capitalism can be broken, but understanding the rules themselves is essential to understanding capitalist economics.