Jimmy L. Bryan Jr. The American Elsewhere

The American Elsewhere: Adventure and Manliness in the Age of Expansion is an engagingly written book that tells a story about stories. Its central thesis, worked through all the chapters, is about the cultural power of narrative. Jimmy L. Bryan Jr. shows that between 1812 and the Civil War, generations of restless young men journeyed to the as-yet-unsettled parts of the U.S. and, on their return, wrote up their travels not as factual narratives surveying landscape, flora, fauna, and indigenous people but as tales of derring-do. These tales, he argues, “beguiled a generation of Americans into believing in their own exceptionality and in their destiny to conquer the continent . . . Manliness and whiteness, landscape and frontier, nationhood and otherness represented malleable categories that readily yielded to their manipulations. As both products and creators of these constructs, adventurers demonstrated that individual preference, informed by caprice, sentimentality, and yearning, drove territorial expansion as meaningfully as social, economic, and political imperatives” (5–6). Adventurers’ words ennobled “greed as enterprise and chauvinism as virtue” (20), by transplanting from the fictions of Lord Byron and Walter Scott some of the motifs of English Romanticism. Especially important motifs were “emotion, imagination, the elsewhere, and the individual” (25). Bryan traces these motifs across several chapters and many texts. Washington Irving’s stories of the American fur trade are strongly featured; novels and, to a lesser extent, poetry are also discussed.

Adventure · Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Destiny (ISS module) · Frontier · Literature · Manifest destiny · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Romance · Sentimentality · Virtue · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies