Capturing citizenship: Authentication and authority in romances of early settlement by Catharine Maria Sedgwick, James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, and William Gilmore Simms

Michael Quinn, Purdue University

Abstract

This study argues that American authors of the historical romance used the genre as a means to connect themselves to the republic. The writers under discussion manipulate inherited categories of race and gender in such a way as to challenge contemporary boundaries of a national identity. Recent scholarship applying post-colonial theory to cultural productions of White Europeans in the United States has been challenged on the grounds that these immigrants did not undergo a true colonial experience and that their productions participated in the imperialist project of manifest destiny. The current study argues against these readings by demonstrating how authors in a so-called Second World settler culture like the United States resisted imperial forms and categories by creating liminal sites through which inherited categories of identity were given new meanings. The works of Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Sedgwick, and William Gilmore Simms, insofar as each author was inspired by a previous frontier romance, provide an example of how these writers used the conventions of sentiment, captivity and the romance to explore the limits of individual freedom during a period when this combination of the terms “individual” and “freedom” formed the fault line along which liberal values sublated republicanism. This study concludes that gender and race became protean signs at least as useful for negotiating and revising political identities as they were for manipulating or restricting them.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Bross, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American studies|American literature

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