Mapping region in early American writing /

Mapping region in early American writing / edited by Edward Watts, Keri Holt, and John Funchion. - 1 online resource (321 pages) : map

Includes bibliographical references (pages 269-293) and index.

Introduction: Bordering establishments: mapping and charting region before 1860 / Edward Watts and Keri Holt -- Section 1. Chartings : colonies and countries -- "To plant himself in with soveranity" : Welsh Indians and the early West, 1576-1812 / Edward Watts -- Reading the routes : early American nature writing and critical regionalism before the "postfrontier" / William V. Lombardi -- The "humor of the Old Southwest" and national regionality / Robert Gunn -- West Indian emancipation and the time of regionalism in the hemispheric 1850s / Martha Schoolman -- Section 2. Mappings : creating places -- The labor of regions : a comparative analysis of the economic and literary production of three southern regions in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world / Steven W. Thomas -- Captive in Mexico : Zebulon Pike and the new American regionalism / Andy Doolen -- On the Hudson River line : postrevolutionary regionalism, neo-Tory sympathy, and "A lady of the State of New York" / Duncan Faherty -- "I was now living in a new world" : Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and New Bedford's cosmopolitan locality / Jennifer Schell -- Section 3. Countermappings : new spaces in old places -- Tribal Christianity : the second Great Awakening and William Apess's backwoods Methodism / Harry Brown -- "We, too, the people" : rewriting resistance in the Cherokee Nation / Keri Holt -- African American literature of the Gold Rush / Janet Neary and Hollis Robbins -- Postscript: Creole adjudication : governing New Orleans and regional provisionality in the long nineteenth century / John Funchion.

"The essays collected in Mapping Region in Early American Writing study how American writers thought about the spaces around them. The contributors reconsider the various roles regions--imagined politically, economically, racially, and figuratively--played in the formation of American communities, both real and imagined. The texts they study--some canonical, others archival, some literary, others scientific, polemical, or documentary--create and reveal important mental mappings and cartographies that reveal how a diversity of populations imagined themselves, their communities, and their nation as occupying various places in the American landscape"--Provided by publisher.

9780820348230 (e-book)


American literature--History and criticism.--Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
American literature--History and criticism.--Revolutionary period, 1775-1783
American literature--History and criticism.--1783-1850
Regionalism in literature.
Space perception in literature.
Landscapes in literature.
Geographical perception in literature.
Community life in literature.


Electronic books.

PS186 / .M28 2015eb

810.9/001