Early borderlands narratives construct the institutional milieus of annexation and its aftermath using discontinuous and interruptive formal structures: jumps between first- and third-person narration, plots that wander away from conclusions, juxtapositions of discrepant temporalities, and shifting levels of fictionality. My research thus presents a more extended literary history of novelistic narrative in the borderlands than is commonly recognized: while the borderlands novel is often treated as a form of twentieth-century fiction concerned especially with cultural hybridity, I locate the genre’s emergence a century earlier in writing more concerned with institutions than identities. My chapters show how these novelistic worlds archive fugitive histories of competing sovereignty claims, porous borders, non-state polities, and bureaucratized dispossessions. The realism of these novels and narratives lies in their presentation of changing social and political landscapes in the nineteenth-century borderlands: less concerned with individual psychology than with social relations and institutions, the works I study construct verisimilar and historically specific milieus in which characters experience the incorporation of border regions into the U.S. “The Borderlands Aesthetic” reconstructs this transnational literary history in order to create a revised account of the aesthetics and politics of realist narrative. and Mexico: John Rollin Ridge, Mark Twain, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Frank Norris, Heriberto Frías, Lauro Aguirre, Teresa Urrea, and others. Contributors to this body of writing include both long-canonized and recently recovered authors from the U.S. annexation of a vast swath of northern Mexico in 1848, a range of English- and Spanish-language authors who lived in the region composed fictions narrating the transformations of government and sovereignty unfolding around them. 2015 Theses Doctoral The Borderlands Aesthetic: Realism and Governments at the Edges of Nationsįollowing the U.S.
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