Southern Literary Horizons in Young America: Imaginative Development of a Regional Geography
2009; Volume: 42; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2165-2678
Autores Tópico(s)Literature: history, themes, analysis
ResumoJoining in the new Young America circle in the late 1830s, William Gilmore Simms began to flesh out a coherent and consistent set of ideas about the relationship between literature, a people, and a nation. He did so under the strong influence of Sir Walter Scott. These fundamental ways of thinking led him to emulate Scott's Scottish Border romances in his own southern romances and also to devote much of his enormous energy to fostering southern periodicals. Gradually, in the face of growing sectional tensions, these vigorously developed and expounded commitments led him through American nationalism to southern nationalism. After the defeat of the Confederacy, however, this focus no longer sustained him emotionally, ideologically, or financially. In his effort to reclaim northern audiences, he redirected the romance formulas he had borrowed from Scott and increasingly turned to writing humorous tales. The targets of his humor were not only particular people and issues, but also, more generally, the overweening, self-serving, and short-sighted persons in positions of power. Throughout, he developed imaginatively his picture of the American South's historical, physical, and cultural emergence, character, and components. *** The American people were inventing and performing their nationalism long before American belles lettrists followed suit. They did so in boisterous parades, in solemn and long-winded speeches on national holidays, marking the great milestones in America's progress to independence, and in the emerging hagiography about the founding fathers. George Washington's presidential tour of the new nation combined elements of all these celebratory and commemorative forms. A generation later, the Marquis de Lafayette made a similar progress from ball to fete to procession across the country that he had helped set free. (1) Yet, in letters, as in the arts more broadly, the new United States lagged. It did so in several senses. As American authors and artists noted at the time, their best efforts did not have the markets, influence, or sophistication of contemporary British and French productions. Moreover, the young nation's literary and artistic imagination did not yet encompass, or convey, the drama of the nature and the experience of the West that were drawing more and more settlers across the Appalachians. Indeed, over the first five decades of the republic, the United States scarcely ranged artistically even as far as the mountains. The Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific suggested the immensity of the American future and landscape available for artists and writers to explore and develop but, in doing so, also showed how far short of their subjects and potential American belles lettrists and painters fell. The westerning nation continued to outpace its literary and artistic explorers into the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Then the election of Tennessean Andrew Jackson as president showed how important the West had become to the nation. Although belles lettrists were not yet engaged in understanding and portraying this shift, others were. Journalists, marketers, and other contemporary witnesses were filling many column inches with their enthusiasm or anxiety about the implications of the pell mell rush to the Mississippi and beyond. Perhaps no early example of the westerning spirit was more celebrated than Daniel Boone, the fabled frontiersman. His life story, with or without extravagant embellishment, had world-wide circulation, beginning in 1784 with John Filson's Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucke. By the 1820s, an increasing number of Romantic writers were deriving inspiration from and using this material (West 29-40). One theme proved particularly compelling--that of the individual facing the challenges of nature and primitive violence away from civilization. Writers as diverse as Byron and Goethe gloried in this heroic image. …
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