| This project examines western American authorship: the way in which western writers imagine themselves in relation to the literary canon, to the dominant eastern marketplace, and to American culture in general. The working critical theory is that authors influence their canonical reputations through their own self-inventions and strategies; authors are not mere instruments or reflections of culture but are active agents. Complexly, the self-fashionings of western writers, problematically based on the constructions of "authenticity" (historical realism) and "place" (regional affiliation), frequently produced results that failed, at least by the established (often eastern) standards of American canonical success.; The first two chapters emphasize the authorial establishment of authenticity as a form of self-definition and promotion: the ways that nineteenth-century authors claimed an exclusive authenticity and regional affiliation. Chapter One traces the first wave of self-consciously western authorship, showing how writers in the 1830s such as Timothy Flint, James Hall, and Caroline Kirkland activated the discourse of authenticity to legitimate their writings within and against the broad reach of the dominant eastern marketplace. The second chapter engages recent historicist theories of representation to examine poet Joaquin Miller's extravagant efforts at self-invention as the "the real thing." The third and fourth chapters maintain the focus on authenticity and place, but do so from within: the writers in question (Frank Norris and twentieth-century nature writers) are not founders of this discursivity but rather respondents to their own inherited authorial condition. The literary struggles of Frank Norris reveal the troubled emergence of western writing at the turn of the century. Finally, nature writers (including John Muir, Mary Austin, Gary Snyder, Terry Tempest Williams) seek to re-place conventional notions of cultural influence with an ecocentric model, claiming that their writings (and their authorial identities) have been influenced primarily by "the land," not literary or cultural pressures. These western writers also legitimize their work through the claim of authenticity and place--but emphatically transform the meanings of both terms. |
