Uniting States: Narration, Space, and Nation in Four Nineteenth-Century American Travel Novels
Hurt, Matthew Joseph
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/81514
Description
Title
Uniting States: Narration, Space, and Nation in Four Nineteenth-Century American Travel Novels
Author(s)
Hurt, Matthew Joseph
Issue Date
2000
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Parker, Robert Dale
Department of Study
English
Discipline
English
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Literature, American
Language
eng
Abstract
"Since the birth of a self-consciously national literary tradition in the early republic, American writers have located American national identity within a dialectical spatial imaginary where ideologies of spatial transcendence compete with those of local authority and regional difference. ""Uniting States"" maps this spatial imaginary as it operates in four nineteenth-century domestic travel novels, tracing the grim fate of the local as a site of cultural authority and a category of national self-identity in Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry (1792--1815), William A. Caruthers' The Kentuckian in New York (1834), Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man (1857), and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The writers I discuss found in the picaresque's geographic scope, formal expansiveness, and textual fluidity a metaphor for a spatially expanding and socially fluid nation, and the models of narrative and national authority that emerge in their novels signal the local's increasingly diminished reputation in the nation's imagined community."
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