The Legibility of Empire in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Abstract

In this dissertation, “The Legibility of Empire in Nineteenth-Century American Literature,” I examine how American authors used their literary works to comment on – and, at times, challenge – the way legibility is mobilized to manifest imagined communities such as the nation and empire. My use of the term legibility is deliberate, as I mean to evoke the way that ideas and information become visible through language and writing. In recent years, critics have examined how authors have approached issues of geographic representation in their literary works. This dissertation pursues a similar trajectory, investigating the way that authors simultaneously embraced and questioned the capacities of geography and literature to make the world legible through language or writing, thereby demonstrating how important geography was to nineteenth-century American literature. Using legibility as a grounding concept for this dissertation, however, allows for a more diversified approach to the same issues of institutional power and national identity that other critics have traced in the influence of geography on literature. Questions central to this dissertation include: How does legibility facilitate acquisitions of information that lead to power (generally), and structure the growth and expansion of governing institutions in the United States (specifically)? Similarly, how is legibility mobilized subversively to undermine the power of governing institutions? In my endeavor to answer these questions, I analyze works from major and minor American authors throughout the long-nineteenth century, including Charles Brockden Brown, Leonora Sansay, Herman Melville, and Sarah Orne Jewett. In doing so, I extend arguments in existing criticism on the intersections that appear between geography and literary works to discuss the way that legibility is alternately wielded to both reify and disrupt the formation of imagined communities.