Territories of Empire

U.S. Writing from the Louisiana Purchase to Mexican Independence

Andy Doolen

Oxford Studies in American Literary History

Poses a significant departure from other works on American imperialism and transnational analysis, which traditionally focus on the colonial era or the 19C from the 1840s on
Draws on an impressive, extensive array of cartographic texts: exploration narratives, novels, oratory, and natural histories, to autobiographies, travel narratives, poetry, and periodical literature
Opens up a critical discussion about the relationship between state and non-state agents

Territories of Empire

U.S. Writing from the Louisiana Purchase to Mexican Independence

Andy Doolen

Oxford Studies in American Literary History

Description

Practically speaking, nineteenth-century American literary history really refers to writings from the East seaboard of the United States. In fact, no author from the West prior to Mark Twain has been admitted into the canon of American literature, a longstanding bias that continues to define the narrative arc of U.S. literary nationalism. Western authors are absent from the canon and classroom largely because their "regional writings" are assumed to be second-rate in comparison with the ostensibly more complex literary cultures of the eastern states. Andy Doolen's monograph reorients literary history, turning to the neglected Western writings that shaped the distinctive process of U.S. expansionism in the years following the Louisiana Purchase. As Doolen shows, these "cartographic texts" legitimated U.S. occupancy of contested border zones and justified the nation's move westward. In five chapters, Territories of Empire surveys an under-studied archive of these texts, ranging from exploration narratives, novels, oratory, and natural histories, to autobiographies, travel narratives, poetry, and periodical literature. In writings as dissimilar as protest petitions from white Louisianans, Kentucky newspaper accounts of the Burr conspiracy, the explorer Zebulon Pike's 1810 account of the upper Rio Grande, and Timothy Flint's 1826 novel about a young New Englander who fights in the Mexican independence struggle, Americans were expanding the national imagination into new continental dimensions. Ultimately, these texts show how literature reflected and fed the expansionist ideology of the U.S. by linking national greatness to the urgent necessity of territorial and commercial growth.

Territories of Empire

U.S. Writing from the Louisiana Purchase to Mexican Independence

Andy Doolen

Oxford Studies in American Literary History

Territories of Empire

U.S. Writing from the Louisiana Purchase to Mexican Independence

Andy Doolen

Oxford Studies in American Literary History

Author Information

Andy Doolen, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, University of Kentucky

Andy Doolen is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

Territories of Empire

U.S. Writing from the Louisiana Purchase to Mexican Independence

Andy Doolen

Oxford Studies in American Literary History

Reviews and Awards

"Andy Doolen has provided a compelling and detailed historical account of the development of American empire, which challenges a number of elements of the received story. In addition, through an examination of the 'territory effect', the book demonstrates the multiple practices and texts-legal, political, economic, literary and cartographic" - which together constitute the production of territory.

"Andy Doolen invites us to explore a keener dialectic of US territorial expansion, messily grounded in Louisiana and deeply entangled with Mexico long before the privileged formulation of Manifest Destiny. As importantly, his original consideration of imperialism's textual front invites us to a reassessment of U.S. literary history's own state-nonstate dimensions. Territories of Empire should inspire new scholarship for some time." - Ed White, author of The Backcountry and the City: Colonization in Early America

"This is an erudite, well-written literary study of early US expansion. Doolen draws on an impressive, extensive array of what he calls 'cartographic texts,' eloquently arguing that both state and non-state actors contributed to expansion." - Shelley S. Streeby, author of Radical Sensations: World Movements, Violence, and Visual Culture