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.

Exploring the metamorphoses of the body as a crucial aspect of the Robinsonade's ideologies in the eighteenth century and beyond, Castaway Bodies sheds new light on this fascinating genre through a series of engaging focused readings.

This collection studies eighteenth-century British literature as enmeshed within a dynamic intercultural traffic, participating in the import and export of literary and cultural forms. Eighteenth-Century Transplantations places this transcultural circulation at the centre of attention and presents its products in a unique configuration. Literary transplants into the British context, out of it, and their transmedial afterlives are set together in order to showcase the mechanisms of such cultural commerce. The term 'transplantation', borrowed from medical and horticultural discourses and evocative of eighteenth-century experiments in gardening, is offered here as a useful kinetic model to conceptualize the diverse practices involved in relocating a literary text into a new cultural environment.

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Art explores the links between literature and visual art from classical ekphrasis through to contemporary experimental forms. The collection’s engagement with diverse literary and cultural artifacts offers a comprehensive survey of the vibrant interrelationships that currently inform literary studies and the arts. Featuring four sections, the first part provides an overview of theoretical approaches to art and literature from philosophy and aesthetics through to cognitive neuroscience. Part two examines one of the most important intersections between text and image: the workings of ekphrasis across poetry, fiction, drama, comics, life and travel writing, and architectural treatises. Parts three and four consider intermedial crossings from antiquity to the present. The contributors examine the rich intermedial experiments that range from manuscript studies to infographics in graphic narratives, illuminating the vibrant ways in which texts have intersected with illustration, music, dance, architecture, painting, photography, media installations, and television. Throughout this dynamic collection of 37 chapters, the contributors evolve existing critical debates in innovative new directions. The volume will be a critical resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, as well as specialist scholars working in literary studies, philosophy of art, text and image studies, and visual culture. The Introduction and Chapters 10, 14 and 37 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

An instant success in its own time, Daniel Defoe's The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe has for three centuries drawn readers to its archetypal hero, the man surviving alone on an island. This Companion begins by studying the eighteenth-century literary, historical and cultural contexts of Defoe's novel, exploring the reasons for its immense popularity in Britain and in its colonies in America and in the wider European world. Chapters from leading scholars discuss the social, economic and political dimensions of Crusoe's island story before examining the 'after life' of Robinson Crusoe, from the book's multitudinous translations to its cultural migrations and transformations into other media such as film and television. By considering Defoe's seminal work from a variety of critical perspectives, this book provides a full understanding of the perennial fascination with, and the enduring legacy of, both the book and its iconic hero.

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) has had an enduring and widespread impact, becoming a universal myth. This volume offers various approaches to the rewriting of the desert(ed) island myth of the novel. Its originality comes from the time range covered, as its focus ranges from medieval proto-Robinsonades to twentieth-century cinematic adaptations. It begins with an exploration of Robinsonades written before Robinson Crusoe, prompting discussion about the label “Robinsonade” and why critics have seen Defoe’s narrative as the hypotext of the genre. Robinson Crusoe can only be understood in the context of the imperial expansion of Britain in the 18th century and the rise of capitalism, but Robinsonades adapt to the audiences they address. At the turn of the 19th century, despite the changing context and the increasingly unrealistic claim that one could be stranded on a desert island fertile enough for rebuilding a new life and civilization, the myth of Robinson resurfaced in R. L. Stevenson’s and Joseph Conrad’s fictions. The 19th century was also marked by industrial revolution, progress and scientism, and the authors who wrote Robinsonades at that period witnessed how those developments changed the world. The volume includes a discussion of Jules Verne’s work as a critical perspective on colonial narratives, and deals with transmedial and transgeneric approaches, analysing the bridges and comparisons between the depictions of such narratives in literature, cinema, and television. Finally, the volume proposes a topical approach to the genre by focusing on the link between literature and the environment, and how the Robinsonade can awaken people’s consciences and help make a difference in the world. Bearing in mind the idea that Robinsonades can be wake-up calls, the epilogue of this volume offers a very original comparison between the Robinsonade and the political situation in Great Britain regarding Europe.