The dialogics of metahistory: Historical consciousness in the American romance tradition
Abstract
This study explores the relationship between the metahistorical accounts dominant in Western philosophy and the tradition of American historical romance. Enlightenment thinkers such as Vico, Herder, and Leibniz, as well as Scottish Common Sense philosophers including Smith, Stewart, and Fergusen, posited theories of historical process that informed the writing of history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the same time, Sir Walter Scott adapted the epic romance, establishing a tradition of historical fiction influenced by these historiographic assumptions. Thinkers such as Hegel considered and modified these theories, and Nietzsche later reacted firmly against them. This dissertation provides a detailed review of historiographic theory from the Enlightenment through the nineteenth century and using M. M. Bakhtin's theory of novelistic discourse, explores the manner in which historiographic models are incorporated "dialogically" in the works of James Fenimore Cooper, William Gilmore Simms, Lydia Maria Child, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In exploring these writers, this study illuminates the development of historical consciousness in America, and advancing the work of G. R. Thompson, explores the romance as a useful mode of historical representation.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Thompson, Purdue University.
Subject Area
American literature|American studies|Rhetoric|Composition
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