Nations Unformed: The Aesthetics of Extra-national Literature, 1832-1910
Open Access
- Author:
- Salter, Sarah H
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- July 28, 2014
- Committee Members:
- Christopher Dean Castiglia, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Robert Lawrence Caserio Jr., Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Christopher Dean Castiglia, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Hester Maureen Blum, Committee Member
Sean X Goudie, Committee Member
Maria Rosa Truglio, Special Member - Keywords:
- transnational
aesthetic
Italy
United States
nineteenth century - Abstract:
- Employing texts from a range of genres engaged with issues of politics, art, and social practice—including popular novels, poems, short fiction, philosophical meditations, travel narratives, periodicals and newspapers—I argue for an understanding of Italy and the United States as more intimately connected than has previously been recognized in the body of scholarly literature. The flexible, fantastical character of U.S. – Italian intimacy is a common, and commonly overlooked, element of this transnational relation. Attending to supple types of fantastical attachment, the chapters of this study employ the language of aesthetics to characterize and explore politicized intimate connection. Instead of viewing formalist analysis as a supplement to political historiography, I argue that aesthetic projects directly impact socio-political histories. Refusing the traditional dismissal of imaginative work as “merely aesthetic,” I affirm the importance, indeed the centrality, of aesthetic attention, exchange, and innovation for understanding transnational relations as well as national literatures. Invoking the vocabulary and interpretive conventions of aesthetics, I highlight the ways that aesthetic objects (here, texts) offer modes of cultural association and pleasure not necessarily constrained by material or historical conditions. Instead of using imaginative texts to uncover historical or political reality, I bring interpretive categories associated with literary aesthetics (genre distinctions, theories of form, discussions of stylistic flourish) to bear on a body of writing by turns concrete and dreamlike. In the nineteenth-century writing from and about Italy featured in this dissertation, imagination and politics mingle; indeed, the former is deliberately imported as a means to articulate the latter. Analyses are thus positioned between transnational and new formalist approaches and partake of elements from both critical discourses. Taking up of necessity questions of national affiliation or comparison, I imagine socio-political identifications as distinct forms of collective meaning-making, subject to (and productive of) vacillations of style, genre, and language. Attention to aesthetic qualities allows my analysis to dwell in the world of imagination, of extravagant attachment, as languages of aesthetic inquiry are often descriptive and aggregative instead of declaratively conclusive. As the chapters of this dissertation shift focus across modes of representation and oscillations of form, so too do the imaginative attachments between American writers and Italian citizens demonstrate distinct values and associations. Although an American love of Italy did have what we could call “a politics,” my analyses do not offer political revelation as a consistent end goal; they attend instead to the intimate and extravagant character of the cultural connections explored in this study. The following chapters suggest that imagining oneself to be in love with Italy was an undercurrent of American thought and literature running below diverse historical meditations. How this enamored undercurrent has shaped nineteenth-century notions of extra-national identity, artistic endeavor, and cultural allegiance is the subject of this dissertation.