Description
Book SynopsisExploring 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.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements 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
