VIRGINITY AND MARYLAND: THE AMERICAN FOUNDING MYTH IN 'THE SOT-WEED FACTORS' OF EBENEZER COOKE AND JOHN BARTH (COLONIAL LITERATURE, ANAGRAMS, POSTMODERN FICTION, NOVEL, POEM)

John Barth's fiction is centered around rewriting fictions of the past, either "literary" or "historical." Most of Barth's novels deal with a search for origins, an original myth. The present study is based upon one particular case of rewriting in Barth's corpus, namely, the transformation of the Anglo-American poet Ebenezer Cooke's 1708 mock-heroic poem, "The Sot-Weed Factor," into the 1960 novel of the same title. Previous studies which have compared the two works have focused on how Barth's Sot-Weed Factor is a historical novel, or how it is a parody of historical novels. A problem remained to be investigated, however, namely that posed by the Disclaimer, that, "All the characters in this work are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental." The question was to study what Barth meant by "fiction" and "history" in his rewriting of Cooke. Moreover, the Cooke corpus itself is complicated by missing editions, gaps, and seeming accusations of plagiarism and piracy; the "original" "Sot-Weed Factor" may itself be an illegal imitation.;I have attempted to show that Barth has taken the notion of mimesis to its limits as "imitation of the past," through the demystification of History, the use of plagiarism as literary influence, and the technique of fabrication with respect to literary history. This dissertation is a study of Cooke's problematic identity, and the lacunae surrounding both his biography and works, and how those gaps form an important "text" which Barth has filled in. The two Sot-Weed Factors, read as an intertextual pair, thus complement each other and contribute to a rereading of the American founding myth in terms of a scandal covered up by a fiction pretending to imitate another fiction. Using a theoretical approach informed by the anagrams of Saussure and both the deconstructionist approach of Derrida, and an intertextual method taken from modern French theorists, it was possible to show how certain word-themes function as a signifying network between the two works.