Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, English

Representations of the frontier through the early twentieth century have been subject to two sets of critical criteria: the conventional aesthetic expectations of the particular genres and forms in which westerns are produced, and the popular cultural demand for imitative “authenticity” or faithfulness to the “real west.” “In the Flesh” probes how literary history is bound up with the history of performance westerns that establish the criteria of “authenticity” that text westerns seek to fulfill. The dissertation demonstrates how the impulse to verify western authenticity is part of a post-Civil War American nationalism that locates the frontier as the paradigmatic American socio-topography. It argues that westerns produced in a variety of media sought to distance themselves from their status as art forms subject to the critical standards of particular genres and to represent themselves as faithful transcriptions of popular frontier history. The primary signifier of historicity in all these forms is the technical ability to represent authentic bodies capable of performing that history. Postbellum westerns, in short, seek to show their audiences history embodied “in the flesh” of western performers. “In the Flesh” is therefore divided into two sections: the first analyzes performance westerns, including stage drama, Wild West, and film, that place bodies on display for the immediate appraisal of audiences. Section two examines text westerns, including dime novels and Owen Wister's “The Virginian,” that are constrained to appropriate the conventions of performance to “display” in writing the bodies of their “authentic” western characters.

Committee: Chadwick Allen (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2011, American Culture Studies/English

(Dis)Articulating the Frontier Body examines the discursive formation of the body in the history and mythology of the American West. This project examines the body as a “myth-artifact,” or a latent site for the prefiguration and emergence of myth, and an apparatus for refracting and compounding ideas. From the colonial period through the nineteenth century, paradigms for both interpreting and representing the body promoted the expansion of empire, defined bodily alterity, and constituted a burgeoning national popular culture. Bodies and their disassembled parts entered into circuits of capital accumulation, transatlantic entertainment, and narrative networks. Harnessed as scientific specimens, entertainment commodities, disciplinary spectacle, and political propaganda, bodies and bodily appendages performed vital cultural work in legitimating and narrating the movement of the western frontier. Central to this dissertation is the value of the body as both an artifact and metaphor which signified the parameters of racial and regional identity, contributed to the formation of the American character on the frontier, and provided a commercially and scientifically validated narrative of civilization and progress. Themes of bodily dismemberment, prosthetic reassembly, and macabre exhibition symbolized violence and established an exportable national myth of the heroic settlement of the West. Bodily artifacts, prosthetic appendages, and spectral bodies augmented ideas about progress, territory, technology, and identity. They were engaged in the politics of racial difference and hierarchical entitlement to knowledge and power, as well as signifying the colonization of unruly territories and subjects. In the discourse of the frontier West, the body both conjured and denatured reality, contributing to the legacy of a chimerical regional history. This project concludes by challenging the legacy of the frontier as a postmodern vanishing point marked by the successive diminishm (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Ellen Berry PhD (Committee Chair); Scott C. Martin PhD (Committee Member); Donald McQuarie PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; American Literature; American Studies; Ethnic Studies; Folklore; Museums; Native Americans; Theater