Castaway Bodies in the Eighteenth–Century English Robinsonade

Download or read book Castaway Bodies in the Eighteenth–Century English Robinsonade written by Jakub Lipski and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-02-12 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.