The Inverted Compass traces the influence of geography on early American writing. Maps, quadrants, and compasses are at the heart of America’s most celebrated stories, and these geographic tools shaped how Americans understood themselves and their relationship to the landscape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But the emerging discipline also provided writers a way to address the young Republic’s most pressing political and ethical problems. The word geography itself - from the Greek geo (earth) and graphia (writing) - articulates the central paradox. Mapping, even as it claims to represent the world, continuously produces it. Literary works follow a similar logic. The Inverted Compass argues that certain early American writers recognized the parallels between mapping and writing and confronted their political implications through narrative fiction. These writers imagined counter-spaces. They created alternate geographies. They inverted the compass. Their allegories, hoaxes, and satires sharpened readers’ awareness of the role of writing and rhetoric in law and government, directing attention to the often-obscured ethical responsibilities related to Westward expansion and the treatment of minority bodies in nineteenth-century America. The Inverted Compass examines the work of Jefferson, Poe, Melville, and Twain alongside exploration narratives, maps, journals, ship logs, field manuals, land surveys, city plans, political cartoons, spelling primers, court cases, land laws, and Congressional documents to uncover the patterns of reading that guide the spatial imagination and its material products.

This dissertation proposes to build upon a critical tradition that explores the formation of racial subjectivity in narratives of passing in African-American and American literature. It adds to recent scholarship on passing narratives which seeks a more comprehensive understanding of the connections between the performance of racial norms and contemporary conceptions of "race" and racial categorization. But rather than focusing entirely on the conventional mulatta/o performs whiteness plot device at work in passing literature, a device that reinforces the desirability of heteronormative whiteness, I am interested in assessing how performances of a variety of racial norms challenges this desirability. Selected literary fiction from Herman Melville, Mary White Ovington, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and ZZ Packer provides a rich opportunity for analyzing these unconventional performances. Formulating a theory of "black-passing" that decenters whiteness as the passer's object of desire, this project assesses how the works of these authors broadens the framework of the discourse on racial performance in revelatory ways. Racial passing will get measured in relation to the political consequences engendered by the transgression of racial boundaries, emphasizing how the nature of acts of passing varies according to the way hegemonic society dictates racial enfranchisement. Passing will be situated in the context of various modes of literary representation - realism, naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism - that register subjectivity. The project will also explore in greater detail the changing nature of acts of passing across gendered, spatial, and temporal boundaries.

Using a transactional model of reading and writing, the dissertation discusses rhetorical aspects of the experience and representation of the American desert. The dissertations extends recent nonfiction scholarship that claims nature writing as literature by focusing on seven major nonfiction works: Some Strange Corners of Our Country (1891), by Charles F. Lummis; The Desert (1901), by John C. Van Dyke; The Land of Little Rain (1903), by Mary Austin; The Desert Year (1952), by Joseph Wood Krutch; Desert Solitaire (1968), by Edward Abbey; Desert Notes (1976), by Barry Lopez; and Secrets from the Center of the World (1990), by Joy Harjo and Stephen Strom. The Desert, by John C. Van Dyke, is treated in depth, in terms of its use of aesthetic experience to argue for conservation and for a particular philosophy of nature. Van Dyke's establishes his rhetorical stance (including the creation of the narrator and appeals he makes to particular audiences) and initiates his aesthetic and scientific delineation of the subject in the preface to the book, which is studied in detail.

Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White traveled to the U.S.S.R. in 1941 on their and their editor's hunch that something newsworthy was in the offing. The couple went in part to add to their library of phototext books (three had been published since 1936), but more to advance the agenda of the anti-Fascist, anti-isolationist Leftist Popular Front, whose goals coincided with those of the Roosevelt administration. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, they immediately immersed themselves in the enterprise of bringing war news to the American listening and reading public. Through the portals of CBS radio, Life magazine, PM newspaper, and other journalistic outlets, and despite stultifying censorship, they made it clear that the Red Army was a formidable anti-Hitler force that wanted only financial and material assistance from the U.S., and that the Russian people, steeped in patriotism and family values not very different from American ideals, were worthy allies. Stalin, they hinted, was a well-intentioned and well-organized autocrat, but nothing worse. Upon returning to the United States, Bourke-White traveled extensively to promote a Russian-American alliance, and published a photo-chronicle of their Russian trip, Shooting the Russian War. Caldwell published two very different books, All-Out on the Road to Smolensk and All Night Long, that also advocated this coalition. I argue that Caldwell composed Smolensk as a heroic quest to report on the war firsthand, while All Night Long, a popular and sensational story about Russian guerillas, bears all the characteristics of a Socialist Realist novel touting the Soviet cause. Both books were successful in endorsing Soviet objectives in the West. Their individual and collaborative literary products have been largely forgotten, but Bourke-White's photographs continue to inform our memory of that war.

This dissertation considers the way in which the figure of fashion expands and complicates the field of literary modernism. My project treats "fashion" as more than just clothing and other bodily adornment, broadening it to include certain spaces, locations, and objects organized by social hierarchies of performance and display. I focus on the way in which characters--often in the texts of authors on the margins of mainstream modernism--use fashionable dress and the manipulation of social spaces to defy constraining social positions. I argue that fashionable expression allows characters to revise personal history and represent a self in opposition to externally imposed perceptions of identity.The readings of fashionable "moments" I consider show how fashion, like the modernist aesthetic itself, allows authors to fragment and remake conceptions of self and persona, meaning and value, and past and present, all categories scholars now argue were at the heart of the aesthetics of modernism. In chapters on Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, and William Faulkner, I explore the production of womanhood as anti-modern, the generation of personhood through new relations to things, the relations of the signs of race to the more general fashion system, and the relation between the domestic, modernity, and the American South. Examining texts through the lens of fashion reveals the ways in which modernist moments are produced by characters, subjects and authors often considered to be outside the boundaries of the modernist movement through an engagement with concepts of the fashionable, and the remaking of the self it allows. Building on the history of scholarship on modernist aesthetics, and on recent work on the role fashion played in the production and growth of the spirit of modernity, I show how, at the fringes of the American aesthetic, the frictions that brought literature in contact with the fashion system allow us to rethink the history of the early twentieth century.

This dissertation traces the act of walking as both metaphor and physical journey through the American landscape in American texts. Drawing together texts from different time periods, genres, and cultural contexts, I contend that walking is a central trope in American literature. Textual representations of traversing the land provoke transformation of the self recording the walk and the landscape in the imagination of the walker. The experience of walking across and through the heavily storied American land challenges the walker to reconcile lived experience with prior expectations.While many critics have noted the preponderance of travel stories in American literature, they tend to center their studies on the journeys of Euro-American men and less often Euro-American women, and approach walking solely as metaphor. The symbolic power of a figure walking across the American land has rightfully interested critics looking at travel across the continent; however, this focus tends to obscure the fact that walking, after all, is not only a literary trope - it has real, physical dimensions as well.Walking in the American land is more than the forward movement of civilization, and it is more than the experience of wilderness and wildness. In many ways, walking defines the American ideals of space, place, and freedom. In this context, this dissertation investigates the connections between walking, American literature, and the natural world: What is it about walking that seems to allow American writers to experience the land in a way that horses, cars, trains, and planes prevent? What about the land and the self is revealed at three miles an hour? In the texts I examine, walking provides a connection to the natural world, the sacred, and individual and cultural identity. I trace American responses to nature and cultural identity through the model of walking - the rhythm of footsteps, the pain of blisters and calluses, and the silence of moving through the wilderness on foot.

Critics have often viewed Caryl Churchill as a comic playwright but have never analysed her methods and materials. I made a study of her plays in order to uncover the comic techniques she uses, find out why she chooses to use comedy when her themes are so serious and painful, and decipher whether or not she is part of the continuum of literary comic tradition. My study of Top Girls, Cloud 9, Vinegar Tom, Light Shining In Buckinghamshire, Fen and Owners reveals that Churchill makes extensive use of structural principles of the sort employed by the great masters and described by theorists throughout the history of stage comedy.

This study interrogates the figuring of the woman, and/or the feminized immigrant, in texts produced within the United States, in times of national dissonance, where the immigrant serves as the rupture in the text assuaging a contemporary cultural anxiety. I begin with the assumption that while cultural artifacts contribute to the construction of an "American" national narrative, one which I argue has traditionally sought to establish an originary "folk," and which sees capitalist expansion as necessary to that ongoing narrative, these texts point to the instability of this assumption. In examining two novels, Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills (1861) and Willa Cather's My Antonia (1918) I argue that, as the novel form historically mimics the structure of the nation, these novels are sources for investigating the use of the woman/feminized immigrant as an intervening point in a divisive socio-political issues unique to the United States. Life in the Iron Mills uses the immigrant iron worker, to subtly argue against Abolition. My Antonia presents a personal solution to the divisive debate surrounding Eastern European immigration, suggesting that the Bohemian woman immigrant serves as keeper of a museum enclave, preserving an originary America in the face of industrialization. As film has become the most globally, widely consumed text, I examine a Science Fiction film, Species, and a Western (a quintessentially American genre) each juxtaposed with a contemporary response to immigration; Species addresses the hysteria surrounding increased Latino/a influx, resulting in the passage of Proposition 187 in California; Unforgiven uses seemingly marginalized immigrant figures to present a white, male, capitalist disseminator of "story," as the new American cowboy.

Voices of Exile: Reimagining a Polyvocal American South, focuses on the phenomenon of community formation and reformation, particularly the perpetual reimaginings of the South in Southern studies and literatures. This project argues that it is time for the South to be reimagined once more--to move away from traditional discussions of the South along a black/white divide and toward a more pluralistic understanding of this region. In my work, I create a genealogy of what J. Anthony Paredes calls a "New, New South" by recovering the neglected voices that have always been there, but that need to be (re)incorporated into the Southern dialectic. Through a cross-cultural reading of works by American Indian, African American, and Anglo-American writers, I explore a polyvocal South in which regional and ethnic identities are continually contested and reshaped. I pair literary texts that (re)imagine key historical moments of community formation with primary documents of the historical moment being addressed. Literary texts and authors explored in this project include: Diane Glancy's Pushing the Bear, William Melvin Kelley's A Different Drummer, LeAnne Howe's Shell Shaker, and William Faulkner's Wilderness stories and Go Down, Moses. My project's aim is to look at the South as a community or narrative of polyvocality, tearing down the idea of a master narrative or "bifurcated" South, and trading it in for a "non-traditional" South which is more representative of America--a multicultural, multivocal community.