"A wayless way": Patterns of adventure in nineteenth -century American travel narratives.
Item
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Title
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"A wayless way": Patterns of adventure in nineteenth -century American travel narratives.
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Identifier
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AAI9969738
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identifier
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9969738
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Creator
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Sumption, Linda Jan.
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Contributor
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Adviser: William P. Kelly
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Date
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2000
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | American Studies | History, United States
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Abstract
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This dissertation analyzes the relationship between adventure and narrative in both well-known and obscure chronicles of nineteenth-century American exploration, migration and travel. Adventure has created a variety of affective, metonymic and textual patterns in American personal narratives, discernable in chronicles ranging from the earliest colonial period forward. Although adventurism is not unique to American culture, its prominence and proportion leave a distinctive signature in accounts both of homes settled, and of travels undertaken. This study focuses upon a selection of early to mid-nineteenth century travel accounts, the period during which adventure's features of chance, risk and the unknown acquired a significant narrative presence.;This study investigates how adventure has undergone a gradual privileging and textualization in American prose. The nation grew upon the site of an adventure, and the adventure was ultimately transformed into a text as the nation's dwindling frontiers disclosed the trail's end. Adventure's dissonant patterns accumulate along three textual pathways: in dialectical patterns of feeling; through the binding of domestic and adventurous symbols and metonyms; and in the metatextual mingling of explorer, captive, and migrant voices that characterizes modern travel writing. Patterns of feeling---such as mourning and exhilaration, love and horror---are complemented by metonyms that bind adventure's estrangement to domestic elements of familiarity and resolution. Opening sections analyze those patterns in the Journals of Lewis and Clark, Margaret Frink's Adventures of a Party of California Gold-Seekers, William Manly's Death Valley in '49, and Rebecca Ketcham's Journal of 1853.;The last section, an investigation of Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast and Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail , addresses the accumulation of adventure voices in American travel writing, a mingling which extends metatextually the contrariness and suspense that mark narrative efforts to represent chance and the unknown. Here, the voices of traveler, captive, explorer and migrant mix together. The results are discrete texts of individual experience which nonetheless manifest a cacophony of narrative voices, and texts which attempt closure but are undermined by adventure's resistance to resolution. Ultimately, this amalgam of voices generates a sense of being at home in travel discourse itself.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
