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1	Xenotopia: Death and Displacement in the Landscape of Nineteenth-Century American Authorship Lewis, Darcy Hudelson 12 1900 (has links) This dissertation is an examination of the interiority of American authorship from 1815–1866, an era of political, social, and economic instability in the United States. Without a well-defined historical narrative or an established literary lineage, writers drew upon death and the American landscape as tropes of unity and identification in an effort to define the nation and its literary future. Instead of representing nationalism or collectivism, however, the authors in this study drew on landscapes and death to mediate the crises of authorial displacement through what I term "xenotopia," strange places wherein a venerated American landscape has been disrupted or defamiliarized and inscribed with death or mourning. As opposed to the idealized settings of utopia or the environmental degradation of dystopia, which reflect the positive or negative social currents of a writer's milieu, xenotopia record the contingencies and potential problems that have not yet played out in a nation in the process of self-definition. Beyond this, however, xenotopia register as an assertion of agency and literary definition, a way to record each writer's individual and psychological experience of authorship while answering the call for a new definition of American literature in an indeterminate and undefined space. authorship land landscape death mortality deathscape nineteenth century Washington Irving William Cullen Bryant Mary Prince Nat Turner Edgar Allan Poe Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Margaret Junkin Preston Emily Dickinson xenotopia dystopia defamiliarization nature ecocriticism sustainability literary marketplace environment literary history indeterminacy antebellum early national black African-American Civil War American Studies Death in literature Landscapes in literature nineteenth century (dates CE)

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Xenotopia: Death and Displacement in the Landscape of Nineteenth-Century American Authorship