Robinson Crusoe's 'Tent upon the Earth'

摘要

The first bourgeois interior in English fiction is located in a cave or Tent upon the Earth' (Figs 1, 2). Every reader remembers Robinson Crusoe's carefully constructed domestic enclosure, with its hand-crafted table and chair, and its inventory of useful objects arranged on shelves. Published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe is regarded by many as the first English novel. Not least among its achievements is its prophecy of the radical alteration our relations to domestic space would undergo with the rise of capitalist enterprise and ownership. Crusoe's inventory of domestic objects is the first in a line of such inventories that extends through many nineteenth-century novels to the Ithaca chapter in James Joyce's Ulysses, where Leopold Bloom enumerates the objects that would fill the bourgeois home of his imagination. The concept of home as the locus of things is found in realist and non-realist fiction alike, as well as in works that draw on both traditions, such as those of Joyce and Sebald.