THE RHETORIC OF DISCOVERY: BRITISH AND AMERICAN EXPLORATION NARRATIVES, 1760-1845 AND AMERICAN RENAISSANCE WRITING (COOPER, POE, THOREAU)

British and American explorers of North America were heirs to conventions of writing about exploration and to a large general audience. Exploration narratives recorded much scientific, economic, and political information, but they were also personal narratives of experiences in exotic regions; as the latter, they supplied images and ideas of the New World for the general reader. The different attitudes of British and American explorers to Indian lands led to their differing ways of dealing with conflicts between desire and reality in the Americas.;In contrast, American military explorers went west on official errands, self-consciously representing their government and society. Their sense of continental destiny made even unfamiliar lands seem essentially unforeign. The pressure of a westering population, together with this sense of destiny, increasingly conflicted with the explorers' objective accounts of the lands and peoples they encountered. American explorers after Lewis and Clark developed a rhetoric in which the land appeared empty and waiting. They "discovered" the America their culture had sent them to find and minimized the land's relation to Indian cultures.;American writers of the earlier nineteenth century had to reconcile the conflict of an ideal America with evidences of earlier American societies and with a contemporary Euro-American civilization that did not fulfill their American ideal. Cooper, Poe, and Thoreau, in this dilemma, turned to conventions and images of exploration narratives to develop a rhetoric of discovery in which personal identification with an ideal, a historical land became a source of American identity.;The main motives of British fur-traders were commercial, and these trader/writers adopted the identity of explorer largely as a persona through which to address the public. British trader/writers treated Indian territories as definitively beyond the threshold of their own culture. The plot of their accounts is a two-way journey into foreign country and then back again to their own. Their crossing and re-crossing of a cultural threshold confirms the distinctness of their home from the exotic culture. It is mainly the liminal experience of a familiar and reliable narrator in exotic surroundings which appeals to the general reader of these narratives.