Tracing back, some scholars tended to view The Tempest, written by William Shakespeare, British great playwright, as the origin of desert island literature。 Shakespeare establishes the background of conflicts on a desert island where ghosts and spirits haunted and let people deal with the battle of good and evil。 Later on, with the publication of The New Atlantis by Bacon and Gulliver’s Travels by Swift, the form of desert island literature began to take shape。 

But to many more scholars, Robinson Crusoe, written by Daniel Defoe in 1719, marked the beginning of desert island literature。 This novel is based on a true story but with exaggeration and amplification, and became a classic masterpiece after hundreds of years。 Defoe was also honored as the father of British modern novel。 Created in the rising era of the rising bourgeoisie, the novel bore a realistic social and political significance。 From then on, desert island literature formally stepped upon the literary world。

The Coral Island, the masterpiece of Robert Micheal Ballantyne, a British famous writer, inherits the tradition of Defoe’s desert island literature。 It developed the personal struggle of Robinson Crusoe into the survival story of three teenagers on a desert island。 Although its era significance was inferior to the former, it was still very popular especially among young readers。 Soon afterwards, another British writer Robert Louis Stevenson published an adventure novel Treasure Island in 1883, which also took a desert island as the story background。 The novel's success is not in the description of the treasure island, but in the experience on the island。 It tells the protagonists’ initiating journey and depicts positive and negative characters for the first time, which paved a new way for the development of desert island works。来*自~优|尔^论:文+网www.youerw.com +QQ752018766*

After the Second World War, Lord of the Flies by William Golding came out in 1954。 This is an “alternative” work breaking through the tradition of desert island literature。 The desert island in this novel is rather a virtual space scene, a key literary element to highlight the theme, than an important story background。 The novel presents a profound thinking on the good and evil of human nature after suffering the two World Wars。 The author also won the Nobel prize for literature in 1983 for this work。 At this point, the British desert island literature experienced the transformation from the original to the modern。