About uis

This is the official website for the NCN project "Poetics of the Body in the English Robinsonade" (2020/39/D/HS2/02074, 2021-2023), run by Jakub Lipski (PI) and Patrick Gill (Co-Investigator).

When Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719, it confronted readers with a curious mixture of familiar allegory and a newly developed realism. That realism was, among other things, expressed through the detailed description of its characters’ worlds and bodies. With regard to ideas of the body in particular, it has been argued that throughout the eighteenth century the mind/body connection was problematised in a way that foregrounded the body as a gateway to the mind. That connection was more than allegorical to eighteenth-century readers: it represented a literal and immediate correspondence, so that discourses of the body in much eighteenth-century fiction can be read as material figurations of character. At the same time, the still prevalent emblematic traditions in representation were manifest in how the body in fiction was used as an idea, an ideological construct to be read and dissected by the reader.

Illustrations:
John Clark and John Pine, Frontispiece to the first edition of Robinson Crusoe. 1719. HathiTrust Digital Library.
Frontispiece to the first edition of The Hermit. 1727. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Louis-Philippe Boitard, The Front of a Glumm Dressed. An Illustration to Robert Paltock’s Peter Wilkins, 1751. The Hubbard Imaginary Voyages Collection, University of Michigan.