Criticism
Literary criticism grounded in doctoral study of the Robinsonade, the castaway narrative from Robinson Crusoe to the present, by a critic who is also a novelist of the genre.
The Robinsonade and Authorial Context
A Critical Study of The Melody That Binds and the Genre
The Robinsonade, the castaway narrative descended from Robinson Crusoe, has long been read as adventure. C.M. Dinsmore reads it through an essentialist lens of his own, finding beneath the adventure the essence of being: the shared human core that remains once social role, cultural identity, and material security are stripped away.
The same essentialism shapes his approach to storytelling. Attending to the essence of each work's time, place, and culture, and to the essential meaning behind its themes, he reads Robinson Crusoe, The Female American, Pincher Martin, Concrete Island, and The Martian alongside his own novel The Melody That Binds to show how authorial context shapes each retelling.
Two further frameworks guide the study: the "ebb and flow" of conflict and cooperation, which holds that narrative tension arises from their interplay rather than from conflict alone, and E Pluribus Unum, unity through diversity, the conviction at the heart of both The Melody That Binds and this study. Along the way, he addresses solitude and trauma, colonial legacy and cultural hybridity, and individualism, economics, and ecology. Writing as both critic and novelist, he approaches the genre from within as well as without, offering a study for scholars, students, and writers of fiction.
- Publisher
- Heliotropic Media
- Publication date
- February 9, 2027 (first edition)
- Hardcover
- ISBN 978-1-961421-06-6 · $44.95
- Paperback
- ISBN 978-1-961421-05-9 · $29.95
- Ebook
- ISBN 978-1-961421-04-2 · $19.95
- Trim size
- 6 × 9 in
- Subject
- Literary criticism
Coming February 9, 2027.
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