The 'I' in the center of the horizon: American and Americanness in nineteenth-century sea literature (Olaudah Equiano, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Celia Thaxter, Sarah Orne Jewett)

This dissertation is an attempt to argue for the strong presence of the sea in American literature as a shaper of national identity for a broad cross-section of writers. In some sense, it at least augments, but hopes to supplant Fredrick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis with an American Sea thesis. The sea has been consistently undervalued as a shaper of Americanness in or literature, yet its influence is felt in almost every genre, in almost every literary period, and in our most prized writers, throughout out literary history. My reading of Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative attempts to show the way the sea is powerfully written into African-American literature; my reading of The Oregon Trail attempts to show how the sea leaves its indelible stamp on western writing; my reading of Melville's problems with genre in Moby-Dick clears room to rethink our definitions of sea literature generically; and, my reading of the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Celia Thaxter, and Sarah Orne Jewett show how women lend their powerful voice to a tradition that has so often been misread as exclusively masculinist. All of this is aimed at a radical expansion of the category of sea literature in America. Through this expansion, I hope to suggest sea-based starting points and provide a frame work for a fundamental shift in the way our national literature is viewed—offering a horizon-based model, which always allows new starting points, over a frontier-based models, which is always looking backward to a time when new starting points were foreclosed.