Eyesight, insight, and literary form in nineteenth-century American literature

This dissertation argues that American writers throughout the nineteenth century use sight as the primary metaphor for literary creation and that its dominance across the century assigns it a figurative function similar to that of the "imagination" in European Romanticism. On one hand, early writers like Emerson and Whitman posit idealistic visual metaphors that attribute metaphor and other forms of literary discourse to real acts of visual discovery (figured most famously by Emerson as a "transparent eyeball") while effacing everything "real" about eyesight. However, writers throughout the century contentiously reconfigure such idealized, disembodied perception into new visual figures that pose alternative, but still intimate, relationships between sight and literary language or form. If Emerson aligns his concept of poetic vision with the transcendent rhetoric used to promote expansionist projects like "Manifest Destiny," for example, writers like Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Sarah Orne Jewett vigorously foreground the physiological, phenomenal, and political conditions of their literary seers even as they often continue to posit forms of vision as the source of their writing. I study not only the ways American writers critique the transparent, often nationalist, vision of their forbearers but also the ways individual writers actively, even obsessively, define their forms and genres as particular, optimal ways of seeing. Nathaniel Hawthorne's Romance, William Dean Howells's realism, and Jewett's regionalism, for instance, are defined and performed as precise modes of vision. While I pose broad questions that reach across the century in order to understand the frequency of the trope in its time and place, I primarily use close readings of poetic form, metaphor, and narrative point of view, to illuminate individual authors' renditions of "literary vision" and to synthesize a long view of the century's trope. This study aims to elucidate the arguments that American writers themselves make about the viability of the metaphors used to define the creation of literary language, and it addresses this inquiry to a century whose writers repeatedly answer with forms of vision---transcendent, fragmented, or rhetorical---that variously question the "discovery" of metaphor, narrative, and literary insight in the American world.