Traveling texts: *Southern travel narratives and the construction of American national identity

This dissertation analyzes the role which narratives of travel through the antebellum South played in the construction of an American national identity during the years between the Revolutionary and Civil wars. As the writers of these intra-national travel texts struggled with the significance of a region that was both America and "other," their accounts performed cultural work long ignored by critics because of an emphasis on texts which cross national boundaries. In Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, for instance, the narrator's definition of the American as farmer is qualified by the importance placed on travel in the text. Bartram's Travels similarly recreates the narrator as a representative national figure, but in Bartram's text European Enlightenment rationality is combined with a "native," proto-Romantic sensibility. While Frederick Douglass's Narrative and Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave both mirror this creation of the narrator as representative man, in these slave narratives the complex relationship between travel and slavery highlights the struggle over the meaning of space and movement in nineteenth-century American society. Fanny Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, on the other hand, explore the intimate relationship between women's travel and the construction of an ideal domestic space. Frederick Law Olmsted, whose popular The Cotton Kingdom is still praised for its objectivity, sought through his travels not only to reform the southern economy but also to expand a New England yeoman ideology throughout the nation. Finally, the published narratives of Union Civil War soldiers suggest that the simple fact of travel was perhaps one of the most significant aspects of the war for many of the participants, as travel has been perhaps the most significant freedom enjoyed or denied the inhabitants of this country since its very beginnings.