- Title Information
- Title
- Unimagined Communities: Literary Forms and Nationalism in 19th-Century America
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Iacono, Jonna H.
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- creator
- Origin Information
- Copyright Date
- 2011
- Physical Description
- Extent
- xii, 178 p.
- digitalOrigin
- born digital
- Note
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2011)
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Gould, Philip
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Director
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Burrows, Stuart
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Reader
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Nabers, Deak
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Reader
- Name:
Corporate
- Name Part
- Brown University. English
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- sponsor
- Genre (aat)
- theses
- Abstract
- This dissertation argues that a driving force in the evolution of the nineteenth-century American novel's theoretical and formal concerns was a broadly shared uncertainty about the shape of the nation. The lack of certainty was not only a question of who would live in the U.S. and how, but also, fundamentally, what the limits of the land would be. While the formlessness of the United States has not gone unrecognized, the powerful role that it had on literature from the Jacksonian revolution to the Progressive era has not been fully appreciated. Though we tend to think of expansion as a process of filling up the United States, this was by no means the self-evident case. Confronted with this formlessness, nineteenth-century writers attempted to construct a coherent account of the nation by advancing a series of formal and thematic innovations. While some of these have survived, many are unrecognizable except as literary failures because their vision of nationality was soon displaced. Reading the fractured aesthetics of the century produces an alternative account of the inexorability of national reunion and Manifest Destiny, one more attuned to the multivalent ways that Americans imagined the nation, as well as the problems the process of empire forging posed for imperial ideologies in their practical and literary expression. Placing this philosophical problem at the center of the nineteenth century allows us to supplement an archive that has been impoverished by a tendency to think of the century dichotomously. Works that fit uncomfortably within traditional generic and temporal confines become legible not as failures of style but as alternative responses to this central problem and as pieces of an ongoing narrative about if and how the United States would expand. The dissertation reads texts by Wilkie Collins, Maria Ward, Mark Twain, Joseph Smith, Elizabeth Keckley, and Sutton E. Griggs, as well as temperance pamphlets, missionary tracts, spiritualist histories, and schoolbooks.
- Subject
- Topic
- nineteenth-century American literature
- Record Information
- Record Content Source (marcorg)
- RPB
- Record Creation Date
(encoding="iso8601")
- 20111003
- Language
- Language Term:
Code (ISO639-2B)
- eng
- Language Term:
Text
- English
- Identifier:
DOI
- 10.7301/Z0251GFD
- Access Condition:
rights statement
(href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/")
- In Copyright
- Access Condition:
restriction on access
- Collection is open for research.
- Type of Resource (primo)
- dissertations