Geographies of the Mind: Narrative Spaces and Literary Landscapes in William Gilmore Simms’s Antebellum Fiction

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  • October 12, 2023
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  • Crosby, Kathleen
    • Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English and Comparative Literature
Abstract
  • Genre affords a theoretical and conceptual framework for knowledge production and knowledge distribution. Rhetorically, genre affords a political, artistic, and ideological tool that enables a rhetor to respond to personal and cultural anxieties. Geographies of the Mind: Narrative Spaces and Literary Landscapes in William Gilmore Simms’s Antebellum Fiction examines ten of nineteenth-century American author William Gilmore Simms’s works, including three manuscript-only ones. Drawing upon rhetorical theory and narrative theory, this project uncovers the breadth of Simms’s rhetorical and literary practices within the confession narrative, the ghost story, the pirate romance, and the sentimental novel. I demonstrate that Simms’s texts both adhere to and subvert the boundaries of generic conventions and, in doing so, elucidate legal, psychological, and transnational concerns of the time. By focusing on the narrative spaces of Simms’s texts, I prove that Simms’s geographic spaces reverberate with hauntings that serve to mark moments of intellectual, personal, and historical disconnect, thereby voicing the disjunctive nature of antebellum southern spaces. By connecting rhetorical theory with literary and spatial considerations, this project offers a detailed analysis of Simms’s work, positing that narrative practices are dynamic and responsive spaces, ones that are reflective of and responsive to the geographies of the mind.
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  • In Copyright
Advisor
  • Andrews, William L.
  • Salvaggio, Ruth
  • Larson, Jennifer
  • Marr, Timothy
  • Gura, Philip F.
  • Blair, Carole
Degree
  • Doctor of Philosophy
Degree granting institution
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
Graduation year
  • 2015
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  • Chapel Hill, NC
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  • There are no restrictions to this item.
Date uploaded
  • January 21, 2016

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