Description
Book Synopsisn The Fortress of American Solitude: Robinson Crusoe and Antebellum Culture, Shawn Thomson analyzes a wide range of antebellum literature offering critiques of the Robinson Crusoe story and its attendant myths. Through the lens of the Crusoe typos, Thomson explores the underlying tensions within bourgeois culture between the restraints of the home and freedoms of the open world. Thomson argues that Robinson Crusoe functioned to normalize the maturation process for boys as they directed their adolescence toward greater expressions of autonomy and self-reliance and allowed women to enter into this masculine territory and understand the landmarks of mens lives. In examining a wide range of major authors, including Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, James Fenimore Cooper, Elizabeth Stoddard,and Emily Dickinson as well as non-canonical authors and newspaper accounts of the period, Thomson demonstrates the power of the Crusoe topos as an animating construct of nineteenth-century United States culture.
Trade ReviewFor individuals who are interested in how Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and other narratives of shipwrecks and castaways influenced antebellum American Culture, Shawn Thomson's The Fortress of American Solitude is useful. More specifically, for Melville scholars, the second, third, and fourth chapters provide some interesting insight into possible readings for how Defoe's novel-and the castaway genre in general-may have influenced Melville's call to sea and the penning of some of his most interesting characters. * The Nautilus *
