Castaway narratives developing in the wake of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the so-called Robinsonades, have always constituted culturally relevant material, invariably responding to the here and now of the author and the reader alike. This project explores the metamorphoses of the body in the Robinsonade as a crucial aspect of the genre’s ideological dimensions. The key output of the project – a monograph entitled The Anatomy of a Castaway (currently under review) – shows how an evolutionary bodily change, or positively evaluated transformations of the body metonymically represent the castaway’s life on the island. Departing from typical visualisations of imperial masculinity in literature and other media, the book will prioritise potentially subversive material. The studied examples of changing bodies will show how the eighteenth-century Robinsonade was able to counter-balance or complicate the imperial message by revising the myths of the New Adam, androgyny and hybridity. The book will argue that even if potentially controversial Robinsonades could still be read as colonial fantasies, they opened a space for radical speculation in contemporary fiction, which has offered more consistent rejections of the imperial agenda. The second output – a special journal issue – will complement the monograph by its focus on the Friday figure and their bodily transformations across Robinsonades. It will re-evaluate Defoe’s Friday as a deeply complex physical presence in the 1719 novel before moving on to other contexts in which Friday-like figures are characterised through their physicality: colonial, postcolonial, philosophical, feminist, ecocritical and posthumanist. Through examining the representations of the body and their ideological implications and contexts, this project significantly expands the current state of knowledge on the Robinsonade genre. The project is carried out in cooperation with the University of Mainz.
Illustration:
Detail from F. Pieters, Episodes of Robinson Crusoe, ca. 1818, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1952
