What Lies Beyond – The Frontier and the Creation of the Monstrous (original) (raw)
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Placing the Frontier in Early American Literature
Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, reveals that there seems to be an obsession with civilizing the wild, firmly placing America as the space which immediately follows the frontier. That space is fundamentally different from the spaces of Europe, which had conquered the wilderness long ago. America's position is thus within such a liminal space, between the established and the undiscovered. It is one which highlights the dichotomy between civilization and nature in spite of, or maybe due to, their close proximity. Crucially, this space is by definition unstable, necessitating a continual drive to advance or perish, correlating with the historical realities of westward expansion. This relentless need for progress, combined with a finite world, ultimately begets the final question: what happens when the frontier is lost? This anxiety is fully articulated in Frederick Jackson Turner's HOU 2
Research on Humanities and Social Sciences, 2015
Literary landscaping refers to the imaginative representation of nature and the physical environment in the fictional writings of authors who display profound love and attachment to nature and the environment. It emphasizes the presentation of characters and events in a part romanticized and part mythical connection with the soil. Landscape or seascape is as such the natural habitat, the total environment of plant and animal and their ecology as presented in fictional creations. It also emphasizes a mythical as well as practical or realistic attachment to the soil resulting from personal experiences utilized for commentary on human existential problems. Early American writers, therefore, derived inspiration from the land and the experiences of early settlers which were ingrained in their fictional writings. The idea of land and seascape or the wilderness and the unknown world seems to have featured more prominently although not restricted to American Literature because of the vast expanse of land and sea available to the early settlers and which land and seascapes had a mythic or even religious significance on the imagination of not just the ordinary inhabitants but also writers. The significance of land and seascapes to the people results in a highly romanticized vision of the environment in the American Literary imagination. The vision of perfection and idealism appears in the works of early writers who present a picture of frontier life, the wilderness and its potential for human development. This paper attempts to portray the appeal of landscape and seascape and their effect on three American writers as they utilize same in their imaginative constructs that afford them an opportunity to articulate the American dream and the problems of attainment of that dream in a land that promised unlimited possibilities of actualization. The paper also attempts to show how this imagination has actuated a new genre of American Literature in The Midwestern Pastoral.
Literary landscaping refers to the imaginative representation of nature and the physical environment in the fictional writings of authors who display profound love and attachment to nature and the environment. It emphasizes the presentation of characters and events in a part romanticized and part mythical connection with the soil. Landscape or seascape is as such the natural habitat, the total environment of plant and animal and their ecology as presented in fictional creations. It also emphasizes a mythical as well as practical or realistic attachment to the soil resulting from personal experiences utilized for commentary on human existential problems. Early American writers, therefore, derived inspiration from the land and the experiences of early settlers which were ingrained in their fictional writings. The idea of land and seascape or the wilderness and the unknown world seems to have featured more prominently although not restricted to American Literature because of the vast expanse of land and sea available to the early settlers and which land and seascapes had a mythic or even religious significance on the imagination of not just the ordinary inhabitants but also writers. The significance of land and seascapes to the people results in a highly romanticized vision of the environment in the American Literary imagination. The vision of perfection and idealism appears in the works of early writers who present a picture of frontier life, the wilderness and its potential for human development. This paper attempts to portray the appeal of landscape and seascape and their effect on three American writers as they utilize same in their imaginative constructs that afford them an opportunity to articulate the American dream and the problems of attainment of that dream in a land that promised unlimited possibilities of actualization. The paper also attempts to show how this imagination has actuated a new genre of American Literature in The Midwestern Pastoral.
The Frontier as (Migrating) Place in American Social Thinking
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 4, 1 (2012) 149-156, 2012
In my paper the American frontier is described as a moving zone, a social, historical and economic as well as geographical phenomenon. The frontier experience determines American art, literature and social thinking to a large extent even today. The paper deals with the frontier as a moving space in historiography and literature. The essay consists of three parts. In the first part the concept of the frontier as a moving space is outlined. In the second part the relevant works of some American historians are-very briefly-analysed, from the aspect of the frontier as migrating space. The third part deals with a selection of literary works-novels and short stories-that show how the frontier is described by prominent and well-known American prose writers.
Mapping the Imagination: Literary Geography
2017
Mapping the Imagination: Literary Geography originates from a conference I organized at the University of Salerno (Italy) in March 2014. I am very grateful to all the participants. Thanks to their work, the conference was a success, and a stimulus for me to carry this project to the next level. 1 The seven articles in this special issue of Literary Geographies deal with British, U.S. and Canadian Literature from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The issue begins with the work of Italian Canadian poet and novelist Mary di Michele in 'Langscape: Language, Landscape and Memory, the Origins of a Poetics'. This article explores the nuances of her double belonging, and her connection to her place of birth in Abruzzo and to the Italian language. The articles move on to examine the treatment of space through a variety of texts and approaches, but all consider space and landscape to function as metonyms. In the articles, space serves important, even though often under-explored narrative roles: it can constitute the center of attention, a carrier of symbolic meaning, an object of emotional investment, a means of calculated planning, and a source of organization. The essays here show how 'narratology and geography can gain from cross-fertilization,' and the product could be an encompassing theory of space in which 'space and narrative intersect not at a single point, but rather converge around … interrelated issues' (Ryan, Foote and Azaryahu 2016: 3). The articles are part of a renewed conceptualization and analysis of the notions of space in works of literature and poetry, and build upon theories of space and place that made up what was known as the 'Spatial Turn' in the 1980s and 1990s. In a general sense, 'space' is the dimensional, physical extent occupied by human beings (OED). In contrast, 'place' is space that we know and 'endow with value' (Tuan 1977: 6). The process of turning 'space' into 'place,' this form of personal and psychological
Literature and the Production of Geography in Nineteenth-Century America
2020
This dissertation examines nineteenth-century American literary writers' critical engagements with and contributions to the production of geographical knowledge prior to the emergence of geography as a distinct modern discipline. Three writers who are now best known for their works of literature, Charles Brockden Brown, Margaret Fuller, and Emily Dickinson, each in their own way sought to redress problems of content and method that they identified in American geographical texts that proliferated in their milieux. In atlases, gazetteers, and geography textbooks, as well as in works of travel writing and nature essays, these writers found not just limited accounts of the country but also, more broadly, what they judged to be insufficient approaches to attaining, organizing, and communicating knowledge of the external world. Their varied writings-Brown's periodical publications, Fuller's travel writing, and Dickinson's letters and poems-attest to and embody a rich repository of critical geographical iii discourse in nineteenth-century American letters that has been all but illegible to scholars of geography and literature alike. This dissertation highlights, and attempts to overcome, the structural differences between modern academic disciplines and nineteenth-century knowledge production that have made these writers' engagements with geography-in the etymological sense of "earth-writing"-difficult to see, let alone appreciate and examine. In addition to expanding conceptions of the kind of work conducted by the individual writers discussed, this dissertation aims to model an approach to accessing, and assessing, the rich and varied economy of knowledge and knowledge production that they not only operated in but, through their acts of writing, brought into existence. iv The dissertation of Grant Matthew Rosson is approved.