This dissertation examines the meeting of a culture and a myth by studying the growth of American abridgments, adaptations and imitations of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, works known collectively as robinsonades. In discovering how Americans have selectively appropriated the themes, structure and narration of Robinson Crusoe, we learn more about the universality of that major text as we learn more about the discrete dimensions of our own culture. The progress of American robinsonades reveals increasingly few successes after the mid-nineteenth century in reconciling the widening divergencies between the claims made on the text by popular and high culture.

The peculiarities of the American publishing industry through the early part of the nineteenth century and the influence of European robinsonades were factors in the development and the uses of Robinson Crusoe in popular culture, uses that concentrate on the outward manifestation of adventure and tale.

Those claims made on the text by high culture were made in two stages. Eighteenth-century American imitators of Robinson Crusoe made use of the still evolving American traditions of Puritan spiritual autobiography and shipwreck and captivity narratives as they probed their heroes' inner journeys. In the nineteenth century Timothy Flint and Cooper focused on the mythic uses of space in their robinsonades. Melville and Thoreau further enriched their uses of Robinson Crusoe by combining the inner journey and the mythic uses of space. They thus set the pattern for those twentieth-century robinsonades of high culture that search the inward manifestations of adventure and tale, exploring the anxieties of identity and the emblematic, visionary meaning of landscape. In that pattern rests the distinctive American imprint on Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.