Castaway Bodies in the Eighteenth-Century English Robinsonade

Erscheinungsjahr 2024
ISBN: 978-90-04-69045-5
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 5, 110 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 181 g

Reihe: Mini-Monographs in Literary and Cultural Studies

Exploring the metamorphoses of the body in the eighteenth-century Robinsonade as a crucial aspect of the genre’s ideologies, Castaway Bodies offers focused readings of intriguing, yet often forgotten, novels: Peter Longueville’s The English Hermit (1727), Robert Paltock’s Peter Wilkins (1751) and The Female American (1767) by an anonymous author. The book shows that by rewriting the myths of the New Adam, the Androgyne and the Amazon, respectively, these novels went beyond, though not completely counter to, the politics of conquest and mastery that are typically associated with the Robinsonade. It argues that even if these narratives could still be read as colonial fantasies, they opened a space for more consistent rejections of the imperial agenda in contemporary castaway fiction.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lipski, Jakub

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Gattungen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements

List of Figures

Introduction

1 The Castaway’s Body in Robinson Crusoe and Its Visual Afterlives

2 Peter Longueville’s The English Hermit (1727) and the Myth of the New Adam

3 Robert Paltock’s Peter Wilkins (1751): Mythical Androgyny and Evolutionary Hybridisation

4 The Female American (1767): a Failed Amazon

Coda: Castaway Bodies in the Counter-Canonical Robinsonade

1 The Elemental Body in Michel Tournier’s Friday

2 Conquering the Body in Olga Tokarczuk’s “The Island”

3 Re-Reading the Amazonian Myth in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe

Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Jakub Lipski is University Professor of Anglophone Literatures, Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland. He has published extensively on eighteenth-century English fiction and its afterlives. He is the editor of Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade across Languages, Cultures, and Media (Bucknell University Press, 2020).