This collection redresses both the gender and geopolitical biases that have characterized most writings within the Robinsonade for young readers since its inception, and includes chapters on little-known works of fiction by female authors, as well as works from outside the mainstream of Anglo-American culture.

Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade examines modern and contemporary Robinsonade texts written for young readers, looking specifically at the ways in which later adaptations of the Robinson Crusoe story subvert both traditional narrative structures and particular ideological codes within the genre. This collection redresses both the gender and geopolitical biases that have characterized most writings within the Robinsonade genre since its inception, and includes chapters on little-known works of fiction by female authors, as well as works from outside the mainstream of Anglo-American culture.

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.

'Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade' examines modern and contemporary Robinsonade texts written for young readers, looking specifically at the ways in which later adaptations of the Robinson Crusoe story subvert both traditional narrative structures and particular ideological codes within the genre. This collection redresses both the gender and geopolitical biases that have characterised most writings within the Robinsonade genre since its inception, and includes chapters on little-known works of fiction by female authors, as well as works from outside the mainstream of Anglo-American culture.

First published anonymously, as ‘a lady’, Jane Austen is now among the world’s most famous and highly revered authors. The Routledge Companion to Jane Austen provides wide-ranging coverage of Jane Austen’s works, reception, and legacy, with chapters that draw on the latest literary research and theory and represent foundational and authoritative scholarship as well as new approaches to an author whose works provide seemingly endless inspiration for reinterpretation, adaptation, and appropriation. The Companion provides up-to-date work by an international team of established and emerging Austen scholars and includes exciting chapters not just on Austen in her time but on her ongoing afterlife, whether in the academy and the wider world of her fans or in cinema, new media, and the commercial world. Parts within the volume explore Jane Austen in her time and within the literary canon; the literary critical and theoretical study of her novels, unpublished writing, and her correspondence; and the afterlife of her work as exemplified in film, digital humanities, and new media. In addition, the Companion devotes special attention to teaching Jane Austen.

Re-Reading the Eighteenth-Century Novel adds to the dynamically developing subfield of reception studies within eighteenth-century studies. Lipski shows how secondary visual and literary texts live their own lives in new contexts, while being also attentive to the possible ways in which these new lives may tell us more about the source texts. To this end the book offers five case studies of how canonical novels of the eighteenth century by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne came to be interpreted by readers from different historical moments. Lipski prioritises responses that may seem non-standard or even disconnected from the original, appreciating difference as a gateway to unobvious territories, as well as expressing doubts regarding readings that verge on misinterpretative appropriation. The material encompasses textual and visual testimonies of reading, including book illustration, prints and drawings, personal documents, reviews, literary texts and literary criticism. The case studies are arranged into three sections: visual transvaluations, reception in Poland and critical afterlives, and are concluded by a discussion of the most recent socio-political uses and revisions of eighteenth-century fiction in the Age of Trump (2016–2020).

This volume addresses the relationship between irony and popular culture and the role of the consumer in determining and disseminating meaning. Arguing that in a cultural climate largely characterised by fractious communications and perilous linguistic exchanges, the very role of irony in popular culture needs to come under greater scrutiny, it focuses on the many uses, abuses, and misunderstandings of irony in contemporary popular culture, and explores the troubling political populism at the heart of many supposedly satirical and (apparently) non-satirical texts. In an environment in which irony is frequently claimed as a defence for material and behaviour judged controversial, how do we, as a society entrenched in forms of popular culture and media, interpret work that is intended as satire but which reads as unironic? How do we accurately decode works of popular film, literature, television, music, and other cultural forms which sell themselves as bitingly ironic commentaries on current society, but which are also problematic celebrations of the very issues they purport to critique? And what happens when texts intended and received in one manner are themselves ironically recontextualised in another? Bringing together studies across a range of cultural texts including popular music, film and television, Isn’t it Ironic? will appeal to scholars of the social sciences and humanities with interests in cultural studies, media studies, popular culture, literary studies and sociology.