Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Colonial Discours

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

My study seeks to identify and elaborate the ways in which American women writers generated, circulated, and questioned colonialism as practice and discourse between 1825 and 1861. Deriving much of its inspiration from the recent developments of postcolonial studies, this study is particularly indebted to Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease's Cultures of united States imperialism (1993), which set the stage for the examination of "the absence of the United States from the postcolonial study of imperialism." Following the path opened by Cultures and by Kaplan's more recent, ground-breaking essay, "Manifest Domesticity" (1998), my study undertakes a feminized version of U.S. imperialism within the discipline of literature. I do this, however, not so much by subsuming women's works in hegemonic and patriarchal (if legitimate) histories of Manifest Destiny and expansionism as Kaplan has done, but by positioning it in an alternative history of U.S. colonialism to which women writers, I argue, made notable contributions. By no means does my study propose to locate the tradition of women's writings outside the male-dominated U.S. history in order that the difference of women be accentuated and celebrated. Instead the aim of my study is to uncover alternative colonial and postcolonial visions in which women played a formative role. To that end, I have unearthed many of the forgotten texts published between 1825 and 1861 that are the primary subject of this study―such as Emily Judson's The Kathayan Slave (1853) and Maria Cummins's E.I Fureidis (1860)―which I reassess in terms of their relevance to colonialism. Taken together, my literary readings argue that American women's texts significantly created alternative colonial and postcolonial visions―visions that were no less instrumental in the fabrication of the destiny of an American empire than the ideology of Manifest Destiny.