Rhetoric, experience, and identity in frontier writing and mapping of the Americas

This dissertation investigates the linguistic and cartographic representations of some of the geographic frontiers of the early and post-independence Americas. It was on or near these actual or imagined frontiers where representations in the form of both narratives and maps presented and investigated---though not always resolved---important issues regarding the experiences and identities of New World subjects. In early and colonial Latin-America, Bernal Diaz of Mexico and El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega of Peru represented their respective experiences of the frontier with a distinctive new rhetoric of the senses developed in response to the nature of their frontier encounters. In the post-independence U.S.A. and Mexico, Washington Irving's A Tour on the Prairies, James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers, William H. Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico, and several different maps from Mexican cartographers up to the 1850s played important roles in the process by which these two new countries of the Americas attempted to work out some kind of national self-identity. This dissertation posits, then, that as different New World subjects began to represent their experiences on their respective frontiers, these distant, strange, mostly unknown geographical spaces became the site of important cultural work---a space supposedly removed from the traditional centers of politics and culture where individuals and nations could begin to answer for themselves important questions relating to their ever-evolving conflicts and identities.