| My dissertation considers nineteenth-century American literary travellers as grand tourists, reading their narratives as sites of social identity crisis and distinctive cultural formation. These narratives dramatize a negotiation with the conventions of travel writing and, correspondingly, with the social roles associated with European travel. Looking at four writers famous for their idiosyncratic travels, I contend that their "performances" as various literary types (e.g. the splenetic traveller, the Addisonian flâneur and the picturesque tourist) amount to distinctive acts of self-definition and sociocultural "discrimination." Each chapter shows how a given author adapts these types to suit the exigencies of his or her social position, often generating deeply ambivalent postures vis-a-vis travel experience and American traveller-identity. The authors inhabit various contradictory roles---the connoisseur tourist (N. P. Willis), the splenetic cosmopolitan (Washington Irving), the social outcast- cum-tour guide (Margaret Fuller), and the obsequious-irreverent picturesque tourist (J. K. Paulding)---in order to claim status and legitimize notions of literary exceptionalism (often while asserting themselves as representative American travellers).;Drawing upon various sociological analyses of class, status, and role-playing (e.g. Goffman's "dramaturgical" theory of social performance and Bourdieu's notion of homologous social and cultural "fields") as well as histories of travel and tourism, I argue that these literary performances should be understood as assertions of control over positionality and identity in a specific literary-historical context. My work represents a departure in the criticism of travel literature, for it treats the genre as a dynamic, conflictual performance rather than a transparent mode of autobiographical expression. What many scholars, underestimating the "interested" nature of travel writing, have missed is the degree to which these narratives are implicated in struggles for social control. Freighted with literary conventions, habits of mind, and stylistic and formal traits that serve as signs of bourgeois cultivation, these works express postures, behaviors, and other symbolic means of drawing social distinction. |
