Trans-America: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Imagination and its Relation to the Circum-Caribbean

2017 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26370330
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Literature in English
• Research Institution: Seikei University
• Principal Investigator: Shoji Hiroko 成蹊大学, 文学部, 教授 (50272472)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2018-03-31
• Keywords: エドガー・アラン・ポー / ミシェル・クリフ / ハイチ革命 / 奴隷制度

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This study deals with the relationship between Antebellum America and the Circum-Caribbean and its influence over the nineteenth-century U.S. literary imagination. The Haitian Revolution that started in 1791 and ended in the birth of a black republic in 1804 exerted a significant impact over the post-revolutionary United States and its nation-building as a white Anglo-Saxon republic. The impact of the Haitian Revolution was especially seismic in the slave-holding U.S. South and this impact is explored in the narratives of Edgar Allan Poe. This study also addresses the remains of colonialism and the emergence of neo-colonialism in the U.S.-Caribbean relation in the contemporary American literature and discusses colonial and post-colonial themes in the novels by the Jamaican-American novelist Michelle Cliff.

Free Research Field

アメリカ文学