Monograph

The key output of the project is a monograph (written by the PI) entitled Castaway Bodies in the Eighteenth-Century English Robinsonade. The book discusses non-canonical Robinsonades: The Hermit (1727) by Peter Longueville, Peter Wilkins (1751) by Robert Paltock and The Female American (1767, anonymous). These are non-standard Robinsonades that challenge the ideal of the imperial body by offering new variations on classical myths (from Edenic naturism to androgyny and hybridity) that question the essence of imperialist ideology: the politics of conquest, race and gender. The focused readings of these novels do not aspire to offer a totalising perspective on the body in the Robinsonade; rather, they aim to reconstruct a counter-tradition within the Robinsonade phenomenon. As the book shows, this counter-tradition was not consistent in its rejection of the imperial agenda, but opened a space of possibilities for contemporary writers to explore – hence the idea to connect these ideologically conflicted Robinsonades with radical Robinsonades of our own time which, in a sense, finished the project. By juxtaposing eighteenth-century material with (relatively) contemporary texts – Friday (1967) by Michel Tournier, Foe (1986) by J.M. Coetzee and “The Island” (2001) by Olga Tokarczuk – the book shows how this subversive potential in eighteenth-century texts plays out today and how the Robinsonade genre continues to represent bodily metamorphoses in its ongoing quest for socio-cultural relevance. The book has been published in the Brill series "Mini-Monographs in Literary and Cultural Studies".