Imagined empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the Columbian trope in American literature, (1771-1876)

My dissertation is a study of savagism and history in the formation of what I have termed the national imaginary. I posit a relationship between the American empire and a literary understanding of history which sheds new light on the expansive and exceptionalist logic of the term America. The first chapter, Commencements, examines the claims made on Freneau\u27s republican identity by the indigenous legacies of the Incas and Aztecs. I find Freneau struggling to articulate an epic destiny that denies its hybridity even as it utilizes a hybridized frontier logic. Chapter two, entitled Foundings and focussing on Joel Barlow\u27s quasi-epics, The Vision of Columbus and The Columbiad, shows how Barlow structured America\u27s classical (Inca) past and made it central to his post-colonial designs, even as it vexed his concept of race. My chapter on Prescott, Noctography, dramatizes the issue of composition, and, by implication, the issue of civilization and barbarism in his romance histories, The Conquest of Mexico and The Conquest of Peru. Prescott was blind and wrote with a noctograph, which he claimed produced hieroglyph-like writing. Pursuing the operation of the hieroglyphic style through both histories, I argue that Prescott maintains a theory of nationalist and racist hierarchies which threaten, in the very work of his own writing, to engulf him and, by implication, an imperial America. The fourth chapter on Melville, reads the stories set off the coast of South America ( Benito Cereno and The Encantadas ) in the context of emerging theories of natural history, which were based on Darwin and Lyell\u27s experiences in the same part of the world. I argue that Melville\u27s understanding of modern (post-Columbian, post-Conquest) history is bound up in the question of creativity and origins, and is articulated in the racial dimensions of biological and national narratives. An epilogue on Whitman, Passage, explores the historical and geographical excision of South American history from Whitman\u27s work (I read Passage to India as a crucial authorial and historicist revaluation)--how this affects his nationalist poetics and how it alters our understanding of his relationship to the public sphere delineated by print culture