ABSTRACT
The story of the castaway is ever-present within the Western modernist imaginary. From Robinson Crusoe (Defoe [1719] 1945), to the Robinsonades of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the media depictions of the last fifty years, Western culture is arguably obsessed with these stories of island survival in the midst of the chaos of strangeness and estrangement. 1 A particular history within this tradition of castaway narratives places the family rather than the individual male at the center of the story. This history begins with Swiss Family Robinson (Wyss [1813] 1963), written by a Swiss pastor, Johann Wyss, who began the book as a series of bedtime stories for his four sons. 2 In 1960, a Walt Disney film version of the book appeared. A science fiction version of the same family story, Lost in Space, was originally conceived as “The Swiss Family Robinson in Space” and screened on US television from 1965 to 1968. This story was remade into a 1998 blockbuster, also entitled Lost in Space.
