Texte remanié de: Diss.--Geisteswissenschaftliche Fakultät--Universität Wien, 1986.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1953. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [866]-886).

Inaug.-Diss.--Marburg. / Vita. Summary in English. Bibliography: p. [267-280].

Thesis advisor: James D. Wallace / James Fenimore Cooper, George Catlin, and Margaret Fuller all spent significant portions of their lives living outside the United States, among people who - at least initially - were foreign to them. The writing those cross-cultural forays inspired demonstrated that they learned a great deal about American culture in addition to the foreign cultures they visited, and that sometimes the insights gained were difficult to hear but impossible to refute. These writers became advocates for a cosmopolitan approach not only to travel but also to cultural identity. Each felt the slipperiness of U.S. cultural identity and determined that the most productive means of securing it was by active cosmopolitan engagement with foreign others. This project explores how travel led them to view culture as a moveable category, and as a result, to work proactively to encourage a culture of patriotic cosmopolitanism in the United States. While Fuller, Cooper, and Catlin lived and wrote, the United States was marked by an isolating insistence on exceptionalism that dominated American culture. Calls for transformative, active, or personal engagement with foreign cultures were rare. Juxtaposing Appiah's approach to cosmopolitanism with the cultural analysis of such critics as William W. Stowe and Mark Renella on travel and nineteenth-century American culture, and Larry J. Reynolds and Michael Paul Rogin, on political issues of the same era gives a new perspective to these writers. Catlin, Cooper, and Fuller were dissimilar in many ways, but all enacted a cosmopolitanism that was unusual for their time and striking in its opposition to nationalist cultural currents. Their careers were defined by travel experiences marked by challenges to their cultural identity, and they met these with self-reflection that led to their awareness of the treatment cultural others received from Americans. Engaging with both Amerindian and European versions of "foreignness" led these writers to preach a cosmopolitan consciousness and to model the best ways for Americans to comport themselves while acting as citizen diplomats. A close reading of Catlin's presence as cultural intermediary in his ethnography reveals a man seeking to meet Amerindians on their own terms; he was a rare case study, and the lukewarm support he received is telling; mainstream Americans were not interested in viewing Indians as living people with a culture worth learning about. Most important, Catlin's writings of his experience in Indian lands and abroad demonstrate his exceptional receptivity to foreignness. Catlin did not see or market himself as a "travel-writer" but rather an artist and advocate for the Indians offering his own brand of proto-ethnography to the nineteenth-century reading public. Nevertheless, his work is an unusual addition to the travel-writing genre, and particularly productive in its presentation of how one adventurous traveler's experience of cultural difference led to cosmopolitan awareness. The extent to which one's experience of a foreign culture can be communicated to others who have not shared in those experiences is limited, and this accounts, in part, for the contradictions, defensive rationalizations, and rambling reflections present in Catlin's accounts. He faced a task that travel writers who direct their work to home-bound readers can't avoid: the unacknowledged naiveté of such readers must be dealt with, and foreignness presented in terms of the known. The psychological processes undergone by cross-cultural travelers can be significant, and are not so easily translated to the uninitiated. Cooper recognized that cross-cultural encounters had formed American identity from the start and worked against the prevailing tendency to denigrate, dismiss, and destroy Amerindians. He noticed that efforts to encourage international acceptance of American culture as a distinctive, worthy addition to the catalog of world cultures were often hampered by cross-cultural missteps and failures. More than most, Cooper understood the process of exploring foreignness as well as the value of the experience, but found that understanding difficult to communicate to less-cosmopolitan audiences. Cooper's cross-cultural engagement is explored in two works that participated in the ongoing transatlantic squabble over the insinuations about U.S. culture in travel writing by Europeans. In Notions of the Americans (1828) and "Point de Bateaux à Vapeur--Une Vision" (1832), Cooper advanced American arguments against the propriety and usefulness of such judgments. Homeward Bound and Home As Found (1838), took these transatlantic discussions to a different level. Remaining staunchly American, Cooper was less interested in defending his country from European "attacks" than in understanding the differences that inspired them; his argument, aimed at Americans, was for a more enlightened U.S. culture--one that had the cosmopolitan skills required to command respect internationally. Cooper's ultimate understanding of "culture" as a moveable category of human difference in The Monikins (1835). Fuller worked for a cosmopolitan American culture that would be able to lead the world for the sake of the progress of humanity. Americans would be simultaneously citizens of the United States and of the world. Through her engagement with other cultures, she sought to fit her own to her ideal. Hers was not a consuming globalism, but a model of international engagement from the ground up. By extending the transcendental opposition to individual conformity to the cultural scale, Fuller hoped that thinking Americans would learn to benefit from the "variety" that surrounded them. In her writing and by her example, she shifted the focus of travel from place to people, urging Americans to travel not only to see foreign places but to meet foreign people and immerse themselves in foreign points of view. She relates her impressions of Native Americans as foreigners who suffer from Americans' failure to see them as a people worthy of respectful engagement, and her desire that her country not repeat that mistake in dealing with other nations. In her first significant travel experience, which exposed her to immigrant settlers and Indian communities, she discovered her interest in learning about and forming relationships with groups of people who were different from her, displaying not only cosmopolitan curiosity but cosmopolitan willingness to put herself forward into the unknown. Her years of study of foreign language and arts had left her better prepared to make meaningful connections there. As a woman she felt especially well-positioned to practice a cosmopolitanism that was its own kind of revolution. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

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This study explores the role of learning and education in American historical fiction written in the 1820s. The United States has been, and still is, commonly considered to be hostile to scholarly learning. In novels and short stories of the 1820s, however, learning and education are recurrent themes, and this dissertation shows that the attitudes to these issues are more ambivalent than hitherto acknowledged. The 1820s was a period characterized by a political struggle, expressed as a battle between intellectuals, represented by the sitting president, John Quincy Adams, a Harvard professor, and anti-intellectuals, headed by the war hero Andrew Jackson. The battle over the place of scholarly learning in the U.S. was played out not only on the political scene but also in historical fiction, where the themes of learning and education become vehicles for exploring national identity. In these texts, whose aim is often to establish an impressive national history, scholarly learning carries negative connotations as it is linked to the former colonizer Britain and also symbolizes social stratification. However, it also stands for civilization and progress, qualities felt to be necessary for the nation to come into its own. The conflicting views and anxieties surrounding the issues of learning and education tend to center on a recurrent character in these texts, the learned person. After providing an overview of how the themes of learning and education are treated in historical narratives from the 1820s, this dissertation focuses on works of three writers: Hobomok (1824) and The Rebels (1825) by Lydia Maria Child, The Prairie (1827) by James Fenimore Cooper, and Hope Leslie (1827) by Catharine Maria Sedgwick.

The Great Plains are prevalent among the literature of the nineteenth century, but receive hardly a single representation among the landscapes of the Hudson River School. This is certainly surprising; the public was teeming with interest in the Midwest and yet the principal landscape painters who aimed to represent and idealize a burgeoning America offered hardly a glance past the Mississippi River. This geographical silence is the result of a tension between idealistic and empirical representations of the land, one echoed in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie, Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies, and Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Margaret Fuller’s more physical and intimate Transcendentalism unifies this tension in a manner that heralds the rise of the Luminists and the plains-scapes of Worthington Whittredge.

<p>This study explores the role of learning and education in American historical fiction written in the 1820s. The United States has been, and still is, commonly considered to be hostile to scholarly learning. In novels and short stories of the 1820s, however, learning and education are recurrent themes, and this dissertation shows that the attitudes to these issues are more ambivalent than hitherto acknowledged. The 1820s was a period characterized by a political struggle, expressed as a battle between intellectuals, represented by the sitting president, John Quincy Adams, a Harvard professor, and anti-intellectuals, headed by the war hero Andrew Jackson. The battle over the place of scholarly learning in the U.S. was played out not only on the political scene but also in historical fiction, where the themes of learning and education become vehicles for exploring national identity. In these texts, whose aim is often to establish an impressive national history, scholarly learning carries negative connotations as it is linked to the former colonizer Britain and also symbolizes social stratification. However, it also stands for civilization and progress, qualities felt to be necessary for the nation to come into its own. The conflicting views and anxieties surrounding the issues of learning and education tend to center on a recurrent character in these texts, the learned person. </p><p>After providing an overview of how the themes of learning and education are treated in historical narratives from the 1820s, this dissertation focuses on works of three writers: <i>Hobomok</i> (1824) and <i>The Rebels</i> (1825) by Lydia Maria Child, <i>The Prairie</i> (1827) by James Fenimore Cooper, and <i>Hope Leslie</i> (1827) by Catharine Maria Sedgwick.</p>

This study examines the ritual of tarring and feathering within specific American cultural contexts and literary works of the nineteenth-century to show how the discourse surrounding the actual and figurative practice functioned as part of a larger process of discursive and visual racialization. The study illustrates how the practice and discourse of blackening white bodies enforced embodiment, stigmatized imagined interiority, and divorced the victims from inalienable rights. To be tarred and feathered was to be marked as anti-social, duplicitous and even anarchic. The study examines the works of major American authors including John Trumbull, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, analyzing how their works evidence a larger national conflation of character, race, and morality. Sometimes drawing on racial imagery implicitly, and sometimes engaging in the issues of race and slavery explicitly, their works feature tarring and feathering to portray their anxieties about social coercion and victimization in the context of the “experiment” of democracy. Trumbull’s mock-epic genre satirizes the plight of the Tory and diminishes the forms of the revolution; Cooper’s novel works as a rhetorical vehicle to prevent a perceived downfall of the republic; the short fiction of Poe exaggerates the horror of uneven and racialized power relations; and Hawthorne’s body of work ironizes the original parody of tar and feathers to expose the violent nature of democratic foundation. Relying on an interdisciplinary approach, this first, in-depth study of tarring and feathering in America reveals that the ritual is a fertile ground for understanding the multivalent social constructs of the time. Examining tarring and feathering incidents can tell scholars about the status of racial feeling, moral values (including sexual and gender norms), and economic fissures of the context in which they occur. Abjecting the body of the victim, the act rewrites the individual’s relationship to the body politic, and the performance of the ritual reveals the continuously emergent, publically sanctioned forms of belonging to the community and the nation. Moreover, examining the representation of tarring and feathering can tell scholars about an author’s relationship to the ideology of an American way.