Eleventh Reading Group:
National and International Relations in the West
Aston University, Main Building 568,
Aston Street, Birmingham B4 7ET
1-5pm, Friday 28 June 2019
Aston Street, Birmingham B4 7ET
1-5pm, Friday 28 June 2019
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In contrast to Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis of US history and identity, nineteenth-century writers – from the US and elsewhere – imagined the West as a space that did not belong wholly to the United States or its citizens. The nineteenth-century “West” was a mobile concept that writers and artists mapped onto various physical geographies, and scholars like Nathaniel Lewis and Neil Campbell have influentially argued for reading the West as a “form of society” than a definable geographical area. In many cases, however, the idea of the West occupied territory that had only recently become, or was not fully incorporated within, the United States: land seized from Mexico and from indigenous people, disputed territory at the Canadian border, and, by the end of the century, landmasses beyond the contiguous Americas. Texts selected for this reading group locate the West in a variety of spaces: from islands in the Pacific Northwest to the Great Lakes, and from prairies to cities. In these texts, the West emerges as a site for encounters between citizens and aliens, and locals and foreigners that demonstrate the instabilities of these categories. As such, this reading group will examine how representations of various “Western” spaces construct and collapse borders between spaces and identities, and host international relations and national fashioning.
As well as examining how English-speaking writers from the United States imagined national and international relations in the West, the reading group also considers how indigenous artists, and British and French writers located the transnational West and represented Americans. As well as illuminating the West as a space for non-Americans to fashion American identity, these texts invite us to reconsider what we mean by literatures of the frontier and the West. We will contextualize these readings with recent criticism on transnational approaches to United States literature and literary responses to Western expansion from beyond the United States. Considering how international literary and cultural relations place the West, the US and “Americans” in the nineteenth century further invites reflections on “Wests” as contested spaces in the present: sites at which US national space and identity is being violently policed and generatively reconstructed by citizens and non-citizens, and by those within and outside the United States. |
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Reading
https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/22401/lot/4082/
https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/21809/lot/2102/
Secondary Texts (these will be made available to registered participants):
- Haida Argillite carvings depicting Europeans (c19th):
https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/22401/lot/4082/
https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/21809/lot/2102/
- James P. Beckwourth, The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth (1855), Ch. 34
- Stephen Crane, “The Blue Hotel” (1898)
- Jules Verne, Around the World in 80 Days (1873), Ch. 25-30
- Susanna Moodie, Roughing It In The Bush (1852), Ch. 5
- Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897), Ch. 5
Secondary Texts (these will be made available to registered participants):
- Peter Mallios, "On Foreign Grounds: Towards an Alternative US Literary Archive, History, Methodology", American Literary History, 29:2 (2017)
- Paul Young, "Industrializing Crusoe: Adventure, Modernity and Anglo-American Expansion," Journal of Victorian Culture, 18:1 (2013)
Registration and Travel
To register for the reading group, please email Dr Abigail Boucher, a.boucher@aston.ac.uk.
Travel bursaries are available for postgraduate students and unwaged ECRs to offset the cost of attendance. If you would like to be considered for a bursary, please include an estimate of your travel costs in your registration email.
To register for the reading group, please email Dr Abigail Boucher, a.boucher@aston.ac.uk.
Travel bursaries are available for postgraduate students and unwaged ECRs to offset the cost of attendance. If you would like to be considered for a bursary, please include an estimate of your travel costs in your registration email.
