Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Colonial Discours

我的研究试图找出并阐述美国女作家在1825年至1861年之间产生、传播和质疑殖民主义作为实践和话语的方式。这项研究的灵感主要来自于后殖民研究的最新发展，尤其要归功于艾米·卡普兰和唐纳德·E·皮斯的《美国帝国主义的文化》(1993)，这两本书为考察《后殖民帝国主义研究中的美国缺席》奠定了基础。沿着文化开辟的道路，以及卡普兰最近开创性的文章《宣示家庭生活》(1998)，我的研究在文学学科中对美国帝国主义进行了女性化的版本。然而，我并不像卡普兰那样，将女性作品归入霸权主义和父权制(如果合法的话)的命运和扩张主义历史，而是将其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贡献。我的研究并不是为了强调和颂扬女性的差异而将女性写作的传统置于男性主导的美国历史之外。相反，我这项研究的目的是揭示另一种殖民和后殖民的愿景，在这些愿景中，女性发挥了形成作用。为此，我挖掘了许多被遗忘的文本，这些文本发表于1825年至1861年之间，是本研究的主要主题--如艾米莉·贾德森的《Kathayan Slave》(1853)和玛丽亚·康明斯的《E.I Fureidis》(1860)--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类的殖民和后殖民愿景--这些愿景在编造美国帝国命运方面的作用丝毫不亚于《命运宣言》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.