The global remapping of American literature

340 Pages·2017·8.736 MB·English

by  Giles, Paul

The Global Remapping of American Literature
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The Global Remapping
of American Literature
Paul Giles
princeton university press
princeton and oxford
Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press,
41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
All Rights Reserved
press.princeton.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Giles, Paul.
The global remapping of American literature / Paul Giles.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-13613-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. American literature--
History and criticism. 2. Geography in literature. 3. Boundaries in literature.
4. Space in literature. 5. Regionalism in literature. 6. National characteristics,
American, in literature. 7. United States--In literature. I. Title.
PS169.G47G55 2010
810.9’32--dc22 2010021517
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Sabon
Printed on acid-free paper ∞
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Deterritorialization of American Literature 1
Part One: Temporal Latitudes
1 Augustan American Literature: An Aesthetics of Extravagance 29
Restoration Legacies: Cook and Byrd 29
The Plantation Epic: Magnalia Christi Americana 42
New World Topographies: Wheatley, Dwight, Alsop 55
2 Medieval American Literature: Antebellum Narratives
and the “Map of the Infinite” 70
Emerson, Longfellow, and the Longue Durée 70
“Medieval” Mound Builders and the
Archaeological Imagination 86
Hawthorne, Melville, and the Question of Genealogy 97
Part Two: The Boundaries of the Nation
3 The Arcs of Modernism: Geography as Allegory 111
Postbellum Cartographies: William Dean Howells 111
Ethnic Palimpsests, National Standards 120
“Description without Place”: Stevens, Stein,
and Modernist Geographies 125
4 Suburb, Network, Homeland: National Space
and the Rhetoric of Broadcasting 141
“Voice of America”: Roth, Morrison, DeLillo 141
Lost in Space: John Updike 154
The MTV Generation: Wallace and Eggers 161
Part Three: Spatial Longitudes
5 Hemispheric Parallax: South America
and the American South 183
Rotating Perspectives: Bartram, Simms, Martí 183
Regionalism and Pseudo-geography: Hurston and Bishop 199
Mississippi Vulgate: Faulkner and Barthelme 212
vi  •  Contents
6 Metaregionalism: The Global Pacific Northwest 223
Reversible Coordinates: The Epistemology of Space 223
Orient and Orientation: Snyder, Le Guin, Brautigan 232
Virtual Canadas: Gibson and Coupland 242
Conclusion: American Literature and the
Question of Circumference 255
Works Cited 269
Index 305
Illustrations

1. Matthew Lotter, “A Plan and Environs of Philadelphia” (1777) 4
2. “Latin America in 1830” 6
3. “Five Hundred Year Map,” from Leslie Marmon Silko,
Almanac of the Dead (1991) 20
4. Map of America by Arnoldo di Arnoldi (ca. 1600) 30
5. William Hogarth, “Columbus Breaking the Egg” (April 1752) 42
6. “A New Map of North America, according to the
Newest Observations,” by Herman Moll (1721) 45
7. “An Exact Mapp of New England and New York,” frontispiece
to Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) 51
8. “New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pensilvania,” by
Herman Moll (1708) 53
9. Town plan of Central Cahokia, ca. 1150 88
10. “Map Showing the Proportion of the Foreign to the Aggregate
Population,” from Francis A. Walker, Statistical Atlas of the
United States (1874) 112
11. Surrealist “Map of the World” (1929) 129
12. “A north pole–centered map best shows relationships in an
aeronautical World,” from George T. Renner, Human Geography
in the Air Age (1943) 134
13. Portrait of Philip Roth, by Nancy Crampton (2004) 149
14. “Map Showing the Comparitive Area of the Northern and
Southern States east of the Rocky Mountains” (1861) 185
15. Sebastian Münster, map of the New World (1540) 209
16. Elizabeth Bishop, title page to Geography III (1976) 211
17. Ursula K. Le Guin’s map of the town of Sinshan in
Always Coming Home (1985) 239
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Acknowledgments
This book was written entirely in Oxford, England, where I worked
as professor of American literature until my move to the University of
Sydney in January 2010. The project began with a series of lectures I
gave in 2004 on “The Deterritorialization of American Literature” at the
Oriental Institute, Naples; and then at Yale University, the University of
Manchester, the MLA convention in Philadelphia, and, in 2005, at the
University of Cambridge, as well as at a “European Perspectives in Amer-
ican Studies” conference held at the John F. Kennedy Institute of the Free
University of Berlin. This talk, which became in revised form the opening
chapter of this book, was also published in an earlier version in Shades of
the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, edited by Lawrence
Buell and Wai Chee Dimock (Princeton University Press, 2007), while an
Italian translation, splendidly rendered by Cinzia Schiavini as “La deter-
ritorializzazione della letteratura e cultura degli Stati Uniti,” appeared
in Acoma: Rivista Internazionale di Studi Nordamericani later the same
year. At the kind invitation of Lawrence Buell, a version of chapter 1, “Au-
gustan American Literature: An Aesthetics of Extravagance,” was given
in August 2007 at the International Association of University Professors
in English (IAUPE) conference in Lund, Sweden, and it was subsequently
published in the IAUPE conference proceedings edited by Marianne Thor-
mahlen (Lund University Press, 2008). An early and shorter version of
chapter 2, “Medieval American Literature: Antebellum Narratives and
the ‘Map of the Infinite,’” was published in REAL: Yearbook of Research
in English and American Literature, 23: Transnational American Studies,
edited by Winfried Fluck, Stefan Brandt, and Ingrid Thaler (Gunter Narr
Verlag Tübingen, 2007), while I also presented versions of this second
chapter as plenary lectures at the Emerson, Poe and Hawthorne societies
conference held in Oxford in June 2006 and at the New Perspectives on
the American Nineteenth Century postgraduate conference held at the
University of Nottingham in October 2008. A very early part of chapter
2, dealing with the theme of medievalism in Melville’s Pierre, was also
presented at the MLA convention in San Diego in 2003.
With regard to the later parts of this book, an abridged version of
chapter 4 was published under the title “Sentimental Posthumanism:
David Foster Wallace,” in Twentieth-Century Literature 53, no. 3 (Fall
2007). A brief extract from chapter 5 appeared as “The Parallel Worlds
of José Martí” in Radical History Review 89 (Spring 2004), while an