ABSTRACT
The self-proclaimed "lowness" was the reason for the writer's exclusion from the contemporary canon – the other novelists considered him a verse satirist and political pamphleteer, and he was not included in eighteenth-century accounts of the rise of the novel. In a frequently reprinted and imitated engraving, Robinson Crusoe poses in a serpentine manner, dressed in a furry outfit, with a sabre at his waist and two rifles resting on his shoulders. The quasi-coulisse in the background take the form of a ship struggling with a storm and a slope of the island fenced off by a palisade. The heroine poses against a lavish background and assumes a serpentine posture displaying the magnificence of the attire. Importantly, she is holding a mirror in her right hand, which orientates the interpretation of the scene. The scene remains a crucial point of reference throughout the narrative, a recurrent image in Roxana's mind's eye.
