Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Colonial Discours

我的研究旨在确定和阐述美国女作家在1825年至1861年间产生、传播和质疑殖民主义的实践和话语的方式。本研究的大部分灵感来自于后殖民研究的最新发展，特别要感谢艾米·卡普兰和唐纳德·e·皮斯的《美帝国主义文化》（1993），该书为审视“美国在后殖民帝国主义研究中的缺席”奠定了基础。沿着《文化》和卡普兰最近开创性的论文《明显的家庭生活》（Manifest domestic ticity, 1998）开辟的道路，我的研究在文学学科范围内展开了美帝国主义的女性化版本。然而，我并没有像卡普兰那样把女性作品归入霸权主义和男权主义（如果合法的话）的天定命运和扩张主义历史，而是把它们置于另一种美国殖民主义历史中，我认为女性作家在这一历史中做出了显著的贡献。我的研究绝不打算将女性写作的传统置于男性主导的美国历史之外，以便强调和颂扬女性的差异。相反，我研究的目的是揭示另一种殖民和后殖民愿景，其中女性发挥了形成性作用。为此，我发掘了许多在1825年至1861年间出版的被遗忘的文本，这些文本是本研究的主要主题——比如艾米丽·贾德森的《卡塔扬奴隶》（1853年）和玛丽亚·康明斯的《我的福瑞迪斯》（1860年）——我重新评估了它们与殖民主义的相关性。综上所述，我的文学读物认为，美国女性的文本显著地创造了另一种殖民和后殖民的愿景——这些愿景在塑造美国帝国命运的过程中发挥的作用不亚于“天定命运”的意识形态。

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.