Configurations of Friday’s Body
Configurations of Friday’s Body
A Special Issue of the Nordic Journal of English Studies
Ed. by Patrick Gill and Jakub Lipski
When Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719, it confronted readers with a newly developed realism expressed, among other things, through the detailed description of its characters’ worlds and bodies. The connection between mind and body or physical and spiritual world 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.