国民文学創生と文化的覇権闘争――セジウィックの『リンウッド家』における建国の地政学――

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  • Regional Conflicts in the Formative Period of National Literature: Geopolitics of Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s America ln <i>The Linwoods</i>
  • コクミン ブンガクソウセイ ト ブンカテキ ハケン トウソウ : セジウィック ノ 『 リンウッドカ 』 ニ オケル ケンコク ノ チセイガク

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<p>This paper reads Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s The Linwoods (1835) in order to illuminate a conflicting relationship between regionalism and nationalism in the early national period of America. A story about the Revolution, The Linwoods has been evaluated as a national discourse that, along with such historical novel as The New-England Tale (1822) and Hope Leslie (1827), aims at providing America with a founding myth. But the novel’s nationalism appears to be rather problematic once we take its New York setting into consideration. Occupied by the British throughout the War, New York existed as an antagonistic presence to the rest of the American colonies. Through the analysis of the workings of this un-American setting, this paper finds in the text a discursive dualism that betrays Sedgwick’s local feelings divided between New York and New England.</p><p>The Linwoods, indeed, induces us to think about the cultural atmosphere surrounding those authors who engaged themselves in bringing national literature to the American audience. In the 1820s and 1830s, national definitions of culture were still highly controversial. With its political leadership rapidly receding, New England, on the one hand, tried to revitalize itself by inventing and then distributing its own idealized image as a model for a nation with which to contend for cultural supremacy. In New York, on the other, the Young America movement set out to protest against New England’s claim for Americanness by exploring a possibility of democracy for a new paradigm of American culture.</p><p>It is, in fact, during this period of regional conflicts that Sedgwick experienced an important shift in authorship. Moving away from Stockbridge to New York City, that is to Say, Sedgwick started a new career as a New York writer. Not only giving up the New England theme, Sedgwick also cultivated a rather intimate kind of relationship with the central figure of the Young America movement, John L. O’Sullivan. As a result, her contribution to O’Sullivan’s Democratic Review reached a peak in the 1840s.</p><p>The dualism that informs Sedgwick’s discourse of America in The Linwoods, however, suggests a psychological difficulty Sedgwick must have felt in pursuing a career as a New York writer by jeopardizing her reputation as a New England local colorist. In the 1830s, no writer could have achieved a status as a national writer by simply expressing his/her patriotic feeling toward America. Instead of it, the situation rather obliged them to find their own place in the New York’s movement toward institutionalization of American literature as a democratic discourse.</p>

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