| In this dissertation I argue that imaginative responses to the exceptional landscape of Florida took on national significance as America expanded. In particular, I examine how the language of Florida's singular features -- such as its swamplands, coasts, reefs, and keys -- provided alternative models for the ways that nations, states, and citizens were made. In the United States conceptions of personhood and identity were rooted in the particular understanding of land that the American founders absorbed from Scottish Enlightenment writers and those who influenced them, such as Locke and Hume. Locke's statement that "in the beginning, all the world was America" implies that the American landscape would facilitate the codified property relations that had already developed in Britain. But what happens to possessive individualism when early American settlers confront a "liquid landscape" that collapses the very distinction between land and water that enables the creation of private property? In fact, early Americans dwell not only on saturated swamplands, but on a range of unusual features that have become emblematic of Florida. The tropical Floridian peninsula -- a landscape of coastal terrain and water-logged soil, subject on all sides to erosion, terminating in a series of coralline keys, harboring a heterogeneous population of runaway slaves, pirates, Spaniards, and Indians, and joining Caribbean, Southern, and South American geographies -- invited reconsiderations of philosophical discourses that historically facilitated America's political and territorial emergence. Such rethinking encouraged the creation of paradigms of individual and national identity that are not grounded in terra firma. |
