Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation analyzes antebellum American novels that adapt the genre of the sea travel narrative. I argue that their adaptations chart a growing self-consciousness about the limits of Enlightenment systems of knowledge. I examine canonical writers like James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville for their intertextual dialogues with maritime voyage narratives from the golden age of American sail (1815-1850). Thus, in addition to discussing well-known novelists, I offer readings of lesser-known sea travel accounts. Literary scholars have increasingly acknowledged both the importance of maritime economic practices and the popularity of sea literature in this period. Their analyses of sea travel narratives emphasize the genre’s representations of labor and the mariner’s craft. My readings attempt to account for travel writers’ persistent return to the terms of Enlightenment knowledge: these writers framed their literary works as contributions to public knowledge and imagined their writing as part of a larger archive of information about the globe and its contents. Writers who fictionalized sea travel narratives reflect on this commitment to knowledge, experiment with its meanings, and consider its construction in ways that expose the potential fictions within systems of ordering knowledge. Sea travel writing from this period incorporated natural history and ethnography, discourses which Mary Louise Pratt associates with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European imperialism. My dissertation considers the ways American writers adapt the languages of European imperialism while simultaneously dissociating themselves with the projects of conquest and colonialism. In this way, I contribute to recent discussions about antebellum American literature’s understanding of empire. I argue that novelists’ representations of Enlightenment projects of knowledge register a critique of the ways that maritime travel narratives serve the purposes of empire. By reading sea voyage novels alongside ostensibly truthful maritime travel narratives and the literary reviews that curated both, I look at the ways antebellum American literary culture imagined the United States’ overseas influence and contend that the forms of this influence were malleable and undecided.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2017
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Citation
Tilden, Stephanie Elizabeth,
"Paper Boats: The American Sea Travel Narrative and Archives of Knowledge, 1815-1850"
(2017).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0V986JM
