Divergent Visions Contested Spaces

This multicultural project examines fictional and non-fictional accounts of travel in the Early Republic and antebellum periods. Connecting literary representations of geographic spaces within and outside of U.S. borders to evolving definitions of national American identity, the book explores divergent visions of contested spaces. Through an examination of depictions of the land and travel in fiction and non-fiction, the study uncovers the spatial and legal conceptions of national identity. The study argues that imagined geographies in American literature dramatize a linguistic contest among dominant and marginal voices. Blending interpretations of canonical authors, such as James Fenimore Cooper, Frederick Douglass, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and Herman Melville, with readings of less well -known writers like Gilbert Imlay, Elizabeth House Trist, Sauk Chief Black Hawk, William Grimes, and Moses Roper, the book interprets diverse authors' impressions of significant spaces migrations. The movements and regions covered include the Anglo-American migration to the Trans-Appalachian Valley after the Revolutionary War; the 1803 Louisiana Purchase and Anglo-American travel west of the Mississippi; the Underground Railroad as depicted in the fugitive slave narrative and novel; and the extension of American interests in maritime endeavors off the California coast and in the South Pacific.

Exploring how English masculinity - that was so contingent on the relative health of the British imperial project - negotiated the decline and ultimate dissolution of the empire by the middle of the twentieth century, this book argues that by defining itself in relation to indigenous masculinity, English masculinity began to share a common idiom with its colonial other. The rhetoric of indigenous masculinity, therefore, both mimicked and departed from its metropolitan counterpart. The study combines an interdisciplinary approach with a focus that is not limited to a single colonial society but ranges from colonial Bengal, Burma, Borneo and finally to colonial Australia.

Space is contested in contemporary multireligious societies. This volume looks at space as a critical theory and epistemological tool within cultural studies that fosters the analysis of power structures and the deconstruction of representations of identities within our societies that are shaped by power.

First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Recently, literary critics and some historians have argued that to use the language of separate spheres is to "mistake fiction for reality." However, the tendency in this criticism is to ignore the work of feminist political theorists who argue that a range of ideologies of the public and private consistently work to mask gender inequalities. In Keeping Up Her Geography, Tanya Ann Kenedy argues that these inequalities are shaped by multiple, but interconnected, spatial constructions of the public and private in US culture. Moreover, the early twentieth century when key spatial concepts – the nation, the urban, the regional, and the domestic – were being redefined is a pivotal era for understanding how the public-private binary remains tenaciously central to the defining of gender. Keeping Up Her Geography shows that this is the case in a range of literary and cultural contexts: in feminist speeches at the World’s Columbian Exposition, in middle-class women’s urban reform texts, in southern writer Ellen Glasgow’s novels, and in the autobiographical narratives of Zora Neale Hurston and Agnes Smedley.

Railway travel has had a significant influence on modern theatre's sense of space and time. Early in the 20th century, breakthroughs--ranging from F.T. Marinetti's futurist manifestos to epic theatre's use of the treadmill--explored the mechanical rhythms and perceptual effects of railway travel to investigate history, technology, and motion. After World War II, some playwrights and auteur directors, from Armand Gatti to Robert Wilson to Amiri Baraka, looked to locomotion not as a radically new space and time but as a reminder of obsolescence, complicity in the Holocaust, and its role in uprooting people from their communities. By analyzing theatrical representations of railway travel, this book argues that modern theatre's perceptual, historical and social productions of space and time were stretched by theatre's attempts to stage the locomotive.

In this study, Russell explores the ways in which Willa Cather and Toni Morrison subvert the textual expectations of gendered geography and push against the boundaries of the official canon. As Russell demonstrates, the unique depictions Cather and Morrison create of the American landscape challenge existing assertions about American fiction. Specifically, Russell argues that looking at the intimate connections between space, gender, race, and identity as they play out in the fiction of Cather and Morrison refutes the myth of a unified American landscape and thus opens up the territory of American fiction.

First published in 2006. Examining the constituting mechanism of the American wilderness myth in Modern American literature, Patricia Ross probes the various purposes for which 'wilderness' is constructed. Considering the work of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Cather, she states that the idea of wilderness is just that, an idea, and not a real entity or something that deserves to be wasted in the chasm of deconstruction. Discovering how literature can help us to understand how we can exert causative control of the myths we create about ourselves, this book is an important contribution to the field.