Uniting States: Narration, Space, and Nation in Four Nineteenth-Century American Travel Novels

Since the birth of a self-consciously national literary tradition in the early republic, American writers have located American national identity within a dialectical spatial imaginary where ideologies of spatial transcendence compete with those of local authority and regional difference. "Uniting States" maps this spatial imaginary as it operates in four nineteenth-century domestic travel novels, tracing the grim fate of the local as a site of cultural authority and a category of national self-identity in Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry (1792--1815), William A. Caruthers' The Kentuckian in New York (1834), Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man (1857), and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The writers I discuss found in the picaresque's geographic scope, formal expansiveness, and textual fluidity a metaphor for a spatially expanding and socially fluid nation, and the models of narrative and national authority that emerge in their novels signal the local's increasingly diminished reputation in the nation's imagined community.