| Summary: | In this dissertation, I identify a genre of travel writing that I refer to as frontier revival literature, which I show to be particularly important in negotiating North American ideas of imperialism, nationality, citizenship, gender, and race from 1880-1930. Meaning about cultural identity emerges through motifs of physical movement in frontier revival literature. I focus on how female frontier revival authors appropriate familiar motifs of frontier revival literature to promote women’s rights.
Frontier revival literature consists of tourist accounts of travel in western Canada by Canadian and American authors who published in northeastern American cities and who wrote for a largely eastern, urban audience. I show how male frontier revival literature authors use American manifest destiny rhetoric in a western Canadian setting to promote ideas of an intercontinental west that, despite seeming to broadly represent North American progress, are highly gendered and racialized.
I combine and adapt elements of feminist and conceptual metaphor theory as a way of reading how women writers of the frontier revival debate such ideas through representations of physical movement. I build on a diverse range of feminist theory to examine how images of the travelling female body negotiate and often contest dominant ideological messages about cultural identity in travel literature by men. I develop conceptual metaphor theory in order to identify a network of metaphors that I see as emerging in frontier revival literature.
Focussing on three different chronological stages of frontier revival literature, I apply my methodology in comparative close readings of the following texts by Canadian and American authors: Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Around the World By Ourselves (1890) and Elizabeth Taylor’s “A Woman in the Mackenzie Delta” (1894-95); Grace Gallatin’s A Woman Tenderfoot (1900) and Agnes Deans Cameron’s The New North (1909); and Mary Schäffer’s Old Indian Trails (1911), and Agnes Laut’s Enchanted Trails of Glacier Park (1926). I explore how these six female frontier revival authors challenge the dominant imperialist and masculinist perspectives of their male peers through representations of the female travelling body.
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