| This dissertation proposes that a commonly-held discursive figure of "the South" has been present in United States print culture throughout U.S. history; that this figure has served as a known quantity against which the nation at large has been gauged through opposition, juxtaposition, and fantastic projection; and that this figure consistently has been posited as a timeless and backward counterpoint to change, and thus has been especially useful to Americans negotiating the passage of the nation into various phases of modernity. The project comprises three sections, each examining specific literary formations concerned with imaging the South that arose at key moments of modernization in U.S. national life.;Section One, "Nationalization," reads late-18th-century travelogues (by J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur and Noah Webster) and early national novels (by Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown, and Tabitha Tenney) to show that even as these authors attempted to contain the scope of the new United States within single imaginative texts, they fell back upon British imperial conventions for portraying the American colonies when they attempted to describe the region "south of Pennsylvania," which they defined in terms of its tropicality, plantation productivity, and reliance on African slavery.;Section Two, "Industrialization," traces the rise of a new figure of the slave South in antebellum national culture (in texts by William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Dwight Weld, Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Harriet Jacobs); this section demonstrates that representation of Southern slavery served as a vehicle for the imaginative assimilation of industrialization in the northeastern U.S.;Section Three, "Imperialism," shows that the figure of the Reconstruction South facilitated the rise of an imperial imaginary in United States nationalism by the turn of the 20th century (reading texts by Edward King, Thomas Nelson Page, Pauline Hopkins, and Henry James).;In sum, by tracking between 1776---the endpoint of America-as-colony---and 1898---the ostensible beginning of U.S.-as-empire---the dissertation demonstrates that the differentiated figure of the South consistently served as a point of triangulation in United States nationalist ideology. As such, the South both disrupted the metropole/periphery binary of European imperialism, and imaginatively intervened in relations between the U.S. and the rest of the globe. |
