Thesis
Uniting States: Narration, Space, and Nation in Four Nineteenth-Century American Travel Novels
(2000)
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.
Disciplines
Publication Date
2000
Degree
Ph.D.
Field of study
American Literature
Department
English
Citation Information
Matthew Hurt. "Uniting States: Narration, Space, and Nation in Four Nineteenth-Century American Travel Novels" (2000) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/matthew-hurt/4/