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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:unt.edu/info:ark/67531/metadc1062864 |
| Date | 12 1900 |
| Creators | Lewis, Darcy Hudelson |
| Contributors | Finseth, Ian F., Rodriguez, Javier, Calcaterra, Angela |
| Publisher | University of North Texas |
| Source Sets | University of North Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | iv, 319 pages, Text |
| Coverage | United States, 1815/1866 |
| Rights | Public, Lewis, Darcy Hudelson, Copyright, Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise noted. All rights Reserved. |
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