It is the aim of this dissertation to discuss the creation of historiographic space in the works of Francis Parkman. More specifically, this dissertation intends to analyze Parkman’s The Oregon Trail and Montcalm and Wolfe as literary texts that examine geographies of cultural interaction and transnational empire building. Parkman’s historical narratives, this dissertation suggests, not only describe historically significant sites, such as the Oregon Trail and the Northern Frontier, but further create literary heterotopias. These textual counter geographies, as for instance his conceptualizations of the trading posts of the far West and the wilderness fortifications of the far North, allow Parkman to effectively interrogate American history. By investigating the fruitful juncture between history, geography, and literature this project aims to establish the importance of historical geographies for Francis Parkman’s methodology and define its function for the creation of a national consciousness. In addition to Parkman’s use of space, this dissertation further analyzes the historian’s depiction of historical characters and his subsequent attempts to define American identity. Thereby, my analysis specifically highlights the relationship between Parkman’s literary characters and their environment. In an attempt to trace the impact Parkman’s historical narratives exert on postmodern authors of American literature, the concluding chapters interrogate the re-negotiation of Parkman’s historiographic spaces in Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water and William T. Vollmann’s Fathers and Crows.

This dissertation examines the technique of archaism as it has been practiced in the historical novel since that genre’s origins. By “archaism,” I refer to a variation of the strategy that Jerome McGann calls textual “literalism,” whereby literary texts use “thickly materialized” language and bibliographic forms to foreground their own “textuality as such” (Black Riders 74). Archaism is distinguished from Blake’s, Pound’s, or Robert Carlton Brown’s literalism by its imitation of older literary idioms, yet the specifically historical quality of its intertextuality also seems different from primarily formal imitations such as pastiche and parody. Although archaism appears to have originated as part of the special language of romance, this study focuses on the technique as a representational strategy within historical fiction. Thus I begin by interpreting Thomas Chatterton’s faux-medieval forgeries (ca. 1770) as a kind of poetic antiquarianism, after which I trace the legacy of Chattertonian archaism in nineteenth-century historical novels including Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) and Thackeray’s Henry Esmond (1852). The last two chapters address the twentieth-century return to archaism in John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), William Golding’s To the Ends of the Earth: A Sea Trilogy (1980-1989), and William T. Vollmann’s Argall (2001). Throughout, I rely extensively upon Georg Lukács’s The Historical Novel (1937), approaching the latter novels as historical fiction rather than as specimens of such post-1960s genres as Linda Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction” or Amy J. Elias’s “metahistorical romance.” Lukács is especially useful because of his sense that historical fictions are animated by the mimetic imperative to represent historical “reality.” Furthermore, the historical novel frame of these novels often serves to historicize literary form, disciplining both the simulation and the metafictionality that exemplify postmodern cultural praxis. Ultimately, I argue that archaism within the historical novel models a historical “real” that is always constructed in a manner analogous to the construction of literary texts, positing a historicity in which imaginative literature offers a key figuration of social experience. Unlike Hutcheon, who advances similar claims for historiographic metafiction, I contend that these novels often use archaism to represent their historical referents as reality—a practice that recalls the “classical” historical fiction of the nineteenth century. By drawing equally on historical novel theory and on Hutcheon, Elias, and Fredric Jameson’s analyses of post-1960s historical fiction as a representative form of aesthetic postmodernism, I synthesize two theoretical discussions which have typically been seen as incompatible. Similarly, this study emphasizes the continuity between old and new forms of historical fiction, expanding on Elias’s salient observation that “postmodern historical fiction stands in the refracted light of nineteenth-century historical novels” (Sublime Desire 6). Concepts of theoretical and aesthetic continuity, therefore, shape both the argument and the organization of this dissertation.

This doctoral thesis contributes to the ongoing scholarly conversation on literary representation of musical sounds, forms, and compositions. My close examination of the tangible presences of Western art music in the fiction of three contemporary American novelists relocates traditional foci of intermediality and word and music studies from referential precision and structural equivalence across the arts to the problem of readerly experience of music through fictional narrative. Exploring a variety of diegetic encounters with music in William T. Vollmann's Europe Central (2005), William H. Gass's Middle C (2013), and Richard Powers's Orfeo (2014), I draw from cognitive narratology and the philosophy of music, among others, to construct a concise model of musical experience and a system of its literary correlatives, which can provide for the reader's enactive response to music-related themes and means in fiction. I discuss the different strategies the writers apply to communicate the presumably elitist experience of Western classical music as suggestive and relevant to their 21st-century readerships, whether big or small. I order my chapters dialectically, regarding the three authors' literary approaches to musical experience as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. In Chapter I, Vollmann's intermedial transpositions of Dmitri Shostakovich's fictionalized works are shown to be framed by a mimetic bias, under which diegetic music functions as a characterization means for the author's historical preoccupations. The thesis (i) I infer from Vollmann's approach is that music is part of the fictional reality representative/informative/definitive of what that reality is like. Chapter II is devoted to Gass's metafictional distrust of representation, whereupon his novelistic narrative discards diegetic music almost completely and points out ways of experiencing verbal textures musically. Gass's method is thus antithetical (ii) to Vollmann's: music is a metaphor for creativity, indifferent to the subject matter and/or plot, which at representation level may well be a parodic perversion of the very idea of creativity. Powers's balanced treatment of musicalized content and form and his generous supply of multivalent experiential cues are forged to appeal to a broader reading audience, as I argue in Chapter III. In what I see as a synthesis (iii) of Vollmann and Gass, Powers's storyworld contains abundant diegetic music that constructs narrative settings and drives the events of the plot, but is itself graspable through musical metaphors. The findings of the thesis open new directions for research into musico-literary reception. Encouraging a revival of reader-response awareness in literary analysis, musicalized fiction is an untrivial subject for interactive theoretical scrutiny by psychologists and philosophers of music, transmedial narratologists, and cognitive scientists. Empirical studies of actual readers' experience of musicalized prose may prove particularly promising in further investigation of this intersectional phenomenon.

No description available.