ABSTRACT
The advantages of defining colonial literature in this broad fashion is that it preserves the distinction which both French and German writers were most conscious of, that between colonial and exotic writing, and enables them to be treated as related but separate genres. We base our reading of colonial literature on the text which Mannoni suggests as its starting-point, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe is regarded by literary historians today as a work of Realism, standing 'at the fountain-head of the English realist novel'. Mannoni suggested that Crusoe peopled his island with embodiments of his own fears, and that this resulted in a tendency to see social relations on the island in extremes. He invites us to read between the lines of the literature describing overseas encounter and to see it as an expression of the starting-point of the colonist rather than as a documentary record of a new world.
