"James Fenimore Cooper and Cormac McCarthy are two of the most celebrated and influential writers of the American West. Both have written powerful narratives that focus on the disappearance of the nineteenth century frontier, and both show an interest in the dramatic ways in whi…
Preface / ix -- Abbreviations / xiii -- 1. Unearthing Herstory An Introduction -- 2. Surveying the Virgin Land -- The Documents of Exploration and Colonization, 1500 -- 1740 -- 3. Laying Waste Her Fields of Plenty -- The Eighteenth Century -- The Visionary Line: The Poetry of Ph…
This dissertation looks to the early American literary marketplace and argues that the American maritime genre, assumed to have begun with James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Pilot in 1824, was not an uncontested genre prior to Cooper’s popularization of maritime nationalism. Inst…
The post-revolutionary sons of America embraced the legacy of the Founding Fathers even as they resisted the authority of those fathers, deemed prescriptive and stifling. My dissertation argues that this ambivalence precipitated a crisis in antebellum consciousness in which simu…
This dissertation examines American historical romances published between 1820 and 1860 by authors who situated contemporary concerns and social critiques within the historical setting of the American Revolution. The eight major texts treated in this study are James Fenimore Coo…
This dissertation investigates the representation of racial Others in James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers, Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Joseph Conrad's Nostromo. The project appropriates Gayatri G. Spivak's critique in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason of the invocation and …
& Quot;For a century, the history of the novel has been written in terms of nations and territories: the English novel, the French novel, the American novel. But what if novels were viewed in terms of the seas that unite these different lands? Examining works across two centurie…
This book examines the close relationship between the portrayal of foreigners and the delineation of culture and identity in antebellum American writing. Both literary and historical in its approach, this study shows how in a period marked by extensive immigration, heated debate…
