Graduate Student, American Studies
King's College London, Department of English
Thesis Title: Reconstruction, Regionalism and Authorship, 1865-1880
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Dr Janet Floyd
Professor Susan Castillo |
About
My current doctoral project is supervised by Dr Janet Floyd and has been awarded the Marcus Cunliffe Prize for the best proposal in the field of American Studies by the British Association for American Studies. My research examines the emergence of American literary regionalism at the end of the Civil War, particularly in the American South. Moving decisively away from previous critics’ emphasis on 1880/90s regionalism and its association with middle-class practices of tourism and consumption, I focus on the writing of region during Reconstruction, at a moment when contentions concerning region and the relationships between regions occupy the foreground of US cultural consciousness. I show how regionalism becomes involved in processes of national and regional reconstruction, and in the development of national and transnational networks and markets. I am exploring the ways in which writers engaged with Reconstruction as a project with political and socio-economic dimensions, as well as their literal involvement, as subjects and writers, in the making of national and international careers through the reconstruction of regions.
While the vogue for regionalism has often been judged to produce a literature of personal and literary impoverishment that effectively institutionalizes the economic and cultural marginality of particular regions within centralizing national cultures, my approach to the proliferation of regionalism during this period has been to think of it as a way of exploring histories of renewal, development and investment. My study recovers a series of authors and also revisits canonical figures whose careers include periods of regionalism. The more familiar regionalists, Edward Eggleston, Mary Murfree and Constance Fenimore Woolson use southern and western locales to map different processes of reconstruction for writer and locale, while George Washington Cable, Rebecca Harding Davis and Mark Twain do some of the work of Reconstruction in bridging regional difference. The Anglo-American writer, Frances Hodgson Burnett, working on a process of personal reconstruction, navigates Reconstruction transnationally. Marietta Holley and Helen Hunt Jackson find a rebellious political voice in writing out of regional consciousnesses. More recently I have been considering the significance of trauma in the lives of these particular regional writers.
I have been a member of the American Studies department at King’s since 2003. During this time I have been fortunate enough to spend a year studying abroad at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and in 2009 enjoyed four weeks at New York University attending a Summer Institute focusing on ‘The Reconciliation of American Diversity with National Unity.’ This was co-sponsored by the US Embassy and Fulbright Commission.
In recent months I have conducted significant archival research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which was supported by BAAS, the University of London, and the School of Arts and Humanities at King's. I have also presented papers on the recovery of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s early regional writing both at the BAAS Annual Conference at the University of Central Lancashire, and at the University of Nottingham. I have also spoken more broadly about my project at research colloquia at King’s.
