%{search_type} search results

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Loving and Hating Steinbeck
• 1. Short Stories in School and Lab:'Tularecito' and 'The Snake'
• 2. Drought, Climate, and Race in the West: To a God Unknown
• 3. Race and Revision: 'The Vigilante' and 'Johnny Bear'
• 4. Becoming Animal: Theories of Mind in The Red Pony
• 5. What Is It Like to Be a Plant?: 'The Chrysanthemums' and 'The White Quail'
• 6. On Not Being a Modernist: Disability and Performance in Of Mice and Men
• 7. Emergence and Failure: The Middleness of The Grapes of Wrath
• 8. Borderlands: Extinction and the New World Outlook in Sea of Cortez
• 9. Mexican Revolutions: The Forgotten Village, The Pearl, and the Global South
• Epilogue: The Aftertaste of Cannery Row
• Notes
• Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

John Steinbeck is a towering figure in twentieth-century American literature; yet he remains one of our least understood writers. This major reevaluation of Steinbeck by Gavin Jones uncovers a timely thinker who confronted the fate of humanity as a species facing climate change, environmental crisis, and a growing divide between the powerful and the marginalized. Driven by insatiable curiosity, Steinbeck's work crossed a variety of borders - between the United States and the Global South, between human and nonhuman lifeforms, between science and the arts, and between literature and film - to explore the transformations in consciousness necessary for our survival on a precarious planet. Always seeking new forms to express his ecological and social vision of human interconnectedness and vulnerability, Steinbeck is a writer of urgent concern for the twenty-first century, even as he was haunted by the legacies of racism and injustice in the American West.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Loving and Hating Steinbeck
• 1. Short Stories in School and Lab:'Tularecito' and 'The Snake'
• 2. Drought, Climate, and Race in the West: To a God Unknown
• 3. Race and Revision: 'The Vigilante' and 'Johnny Bear'
• 4. Becoming Animal: Theories of Mind in The Red Pony
• 5. What Is It Like to Be a Plant?: 'The Chrysanthemums' and 'The White Quail'
• 6. On Not Being a Modernist: Disability and Performance in Of Mice and Men
• 7. Emergence and Failure: The Middleness of The Grapes of Wrath
• 8. Borderlands: Extinction and the New World Outlook in Sea of Cortez
• 9. Mexican Revolutions: The Forgotten Village, The Pearl, and the Global South
• Epilogue: The Aftertaste of Cannery Row
• Notes
• Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

John Steinbeck is a towering figure in twentieth-century American literature; yet he remains one of our least understood writers. This major reevaluation of Steinbeck by Gavin Jones uncovers a timely thinker who confronted the fate of humanity as a species facing climate change, environmental crisis, and a growing divide between the powerful and the marginalized. Driven by insatiable curiosity, Steinbeck's work crossed a variety of borders - between the United States and the Global South, between human and nonhuman lifeforms, between science and the arts, and between literature and film - to explore the transformations in consciousness necessary for our survival on a precarious planet. Always seeking new forms to express his ecological and social vision of human interconnectedness and vulnerability, Steinbeck is a writer of urgent concern for the twenty-first century, even as he was haunted by the legacies of racism and injustice in the American West.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction: Henry Adams and the catastrophic century
• 1. Falling for Edgar Allan Poe
• 2. Herman Melville in the doldrums
• 3. The disappointments of Henry David Thoreau
• 4. Stephen Crane's fake war
• 5. The double failure of Mark Twain
• 6. Sarah Orne Jewett falling short
• 7. The faltering style of Henry James
• Conclusion.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

If America worships success, then why has the nation's literature dwelled obsessively on failure? This book explores encounters with failure by nineteenth-century writers - ranging from Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville to Mark Twain and Sarah Orne Jewett - whose celebrated works more often struck readers as profoundly messy, flawed and even perverse. Reading textual inconsistency against the backdrop of a turbulent nineteenth century, Gavin Jones describes how the difficulties these writers faced in their faltering search for new styles, coherent characters and satisfactory endings uncovered experiences of blunder and inadequacy hidden in the culture at large. Through Jones's treatment, these American writers emerge as the great theorists of failure who discovered ways to translate their own social insecurities into complex portrayals of a modern self, founded in moral fallibility, precarious knowledge and negative feelings.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Preface xiii
• INTRODUCTION: The Problem of Poverty in Literary Criticism 1 CHAPTER ONE: Beggaring Description: Herman Melville and Antebellum Poverty Discourse 21 Paradigms of Poverty and Pauperism 23 Literary Uses and Abuses of Poverty 28 The Ambivalence of Thoreau and Davis 32 Redburn and Israel Potter: Transatlantic Counterparts 38 Melville's Sketches of the Mid-1850s 46 Poor Pierre 52 Problems of Need in The Confidence-Man 59
• CHAPTER TWO: Being Poor in the Progressive Era: Dreiser and Wharton on the Pauper Problem 62 Writing Poverty 65 The Persistence of Pauperism 72 What's the Matter with Hurstwood? 76 The Class That Drifts 80 Fear of Falling 85 The Feminization of Poverty 88 Poor Lily 92 Class and Gender 100
• CHAPTER THREE: The Depression in Black and White: Agee, Wright, and the Aesthetics of Damage 106 Understanding the Depression 110 Agee's Uncertainty 116 Damage and Disadvantage 120 The Beauty and Erotics of Poverty 124 Race, Class, and Poor Richard 129 American Hunger 139 Delinquent Identity 144
• CONCLUSION 148 Notes 155 Works Cited 201 Index 219.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Social anxiety about poverty surfaces with startling frequency in American literature. Yet, as Gavin Jones argues, poverty has been denied its due as a critical and ideological framework in its own right, despite recent interest in representations of the lower classes and the marginalized. These insights lay the groundwork for American Hungers, in which Jones uncovers a complex and controversial discourse on the poor that stretches from the antebellum era through the Depression. Reading writers such as Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, James Agee, and Richard Wright in their historical contexts, Jones explores why they succeeded where literary critics have fallen short. These authors acknowledged a poverty that was as aesthetically and culturally significant as it was socially and materially real. They confronted the ideological dilemmas of approaching poverty while giving language to the marginalized poor--the beggars, tramps, sharecroppers, and factory workers who form a persistent segment of American society. Far from peripheral, poverty emerges at the center of national debates about social justice, citizenship, and minority identity. And literature becomes a crucial tool to understand an economic and cultural condition that is at once urgent and elusive because it cuts across the categories of race, gender, and class by which we conventionally understand social difference. Combining social theory with literary analysis, American Hungers masterfully brings poverty into the mainstream critical idiom.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Preface xiii
• INTRODUCTION: The Problem of Poverty in Literary Criticism 1 CHAPTER ONE: Beggaring Description: Herman Melville and Antebellum Poverty Discourse 21 Paradigms of Poverty and Pauperism 23 Literary Uses and Abuses of Poverty 28 The Ambivalence of Thoreau and Davis 32 Redburn and Israel Potter: Transatlantic Counterparts 38 Melville's Sketches of the Mid-1850s 46 Poor Pierre 52 Problems of Need in The Confidence-Man 59
• CHAPTER TWO: Being Poor in the Progressive Era: Dreiser and Wharton on the Pauper Problem 62 Writing Poverty 65 The Persistence of Pauperism 72 What's the Matter with Hurstwood? 76 The Class That Drifts 80 Fear of Falling 85 The Feminization of Poverty 88 Poor Lily 92 Class and Gender 100
• CHAPTER THREE: The Depression in Black and White: Agee, Wright, and the Aesthetics of Damage 106 Understanding the Depression 110 Agee's Uncertainty 116 Damage and Disadvantage 120 The Beauty and Erotics of Poverty 124 Race, Class, and Poor Richard 129 American Hunger 139 Delinquent Identity 144
• CONCLUSION 148 Notes 155 Works Cited 201 Index 219.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Social anxiety about poverty surfaces with startling frequency in American literature. Yet, as Gavin Jones argues, poverty has been denied its due as a critical and ideological framework in its own right, despite recent interest in representations of the lower classes and the marginalized. These insights lay the groundwork for "American Hungers", in which Jones uncovers a complex and controversial discourse on the poor that stretches from the antebellum era through the Depression. Reading writers such as Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, James Agee, and Richard Wright in their historical contexts, Jones explores why they succeeded where literary critics have fallen short.These authors acknowledged a poverty that was as aesthetically and culturally significant as it was socially and materially real. They confronted the ideological dilemmas of approaching poverty while giving language to the marginalized poor - the beggars, tramps, sharecroppers, and factory workers who form a persistent segment of American society. Far from peripheral, poverty emerges at the center of national debates about social justice, citizenship, and minority identity. And literature becomes a crucial tool to understand an economic and cultural condition that is at once urgent and elusive because it cuts across the categories of race, gender, and class by which we conventionally understand social difference. Combining social theory with literary analysis, "American Hungers" masterfully brings poverty into the mainstream critical idiom.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Late-19th-century America was crazy about dialect: vernacular varieties of American English entertained mass audiences in "local color" stories, in realist novels, and in poems and plays. But dialect was also at the heart of anxious debates about the moral degeneration of urban life, the ethnic impact of foreign immigration, the black prescence in white society, and the female influence on masculine authority. Celebrations of the rustic raciness in American vernacular were undercut by fears that dialect was a force of cultural dissolution with the power to contaminate the dominent language. In this volume, Gavin Jones explores the aesthetic politics of this neglected "cult of vernacular" in little-known regionalists such as George Washington Cable, in the canonical work of Mark Twain, Henry James, Herman Melville, and Stephen Crane, and in the ethnic writing of Abraham Cahan and Paul Laurence Dunbar. He reveals the origins of a trend that deepened in subsequent literature: the use of minority dialect to formulate a political response to racial oppression, and to enrich diverse depictions of a multicultural nation.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

This is a new edition of a classic work of the American Renaissance. Praised at the time as the most emphatically 'American' book ever written, ""Margaret"" is a breathtaking combination of female bildungsroman, utopian novel, and historical romance. First published in 1845, Sylvester Judd's novel centers on the fictional New England village of Livingston, where the young Margaret Hart strives to escape the poverty and vice of her surroundings by learning from a mysterious teacher, the 'Master', and by entwining herself with the powers of nature. But when Margaret's brother is tried and hanged for murder, this rural community collapses, forcing Margaret to face the temptations of an urban underworld and to confront the intrigue of her family history. ""Margaret"" is the story of a young woman's attempt to create a new social order, founded on beauty and truth, in a land plagued by violence, debauchery, and political instability. As Gavin Jones points out in his new introduction, ""Margaret"" perhaps stands alone in its creation of a female character who grows in social rather than domestic power. The novel also remains unique in its exploration of transcendental philosophy in novelistic form. Part eco-criticism, part seduction novel, part temperance tract, and part social history, ""Margaret"" is a virtual handbook for understanding the literary culture of mid-nineteenth-century America, the missing piece in puzzling out connections between writers such as hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Thoreau. ""Margaret"" was widely read and deeply influential on both British and American writers throughout the nineteenth century but controversial for its representations of alcoholism and capital punishment. Judd's novel remains resonant for today's readers as it overturns conventional views of the literary representation of women and the origins of the American Renaissance.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

This is a new edition of a classic work of the American Renaissance. Praised at the time as the most emphatically 'American' book ever written, ""Margaret"" is a breathtaking combination of female bildungsroman, utopian novel, and historical romance. First published in 1845, Sylvester Judd's novel centers on the fictional New England village of Livingston, where the young Margaret Hart strives to escape the poverty and vice of her surroundings by learning from a mysterious teacher, the 'Master', and by entwining herself with the powers of nature. But when Margaret's brother is tried and hanged for murder, this rural community collapses, forcing Margaret to face the temptations of an urban underworld and to confront the intrigue of her family history. ""Margaret"" is the story of a young woman's attempt to create a new social order, founded on beauty and truth, in a land plagued by violence, debauchery, and political instability. As Gavin Jones points out in his new introduction, ""Margaret"" perhaps stands alone in its creation of a female character who grows in social rather than domestic power. The novel also remains unique in its exploration of transcendental philosophy in novelistic form. Part eco-criticism, part seduction novel, part temperance tract, and part social history, ""Margaret"" is a virtual handbook for understanding the literary culture of mid-nineteenth-century America, the missing piece in puzzling out connections between writers such as hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Thoreau. ""Margaret"" was widely read and deeply influential on both British and American writers throughout the nineteenth century but controversial for its representations of alcoholism and capital punishment. Judd's novel remains resonant for today's readers as it overturns conventional views of the literary representation of women and the origins of the American Renaissance.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

This dissertation builds a theory of anti-genre by attending to the surprising absences, mockeries, and active repudiations of the Gothic tradition in a swathe of literature where one would very much expect to see the Gothic thrive. "Lurid Interiors" asks in what contexts, and for what reasons, the Gothic (or indeed any genre) fails to appear. The dissertation discovers a counterintuitive case study in American Revolutionary and Civil War fiction, wherein—despite the seeming Gothicism of the subject matter, i.e. the profound bodily violence and cultural trauma that these wars produced—puzzling lacks, parodies, hoaxes, and vicious dismissals of the Gothic instead abound. I begin by showing that the starkly divergent ways in which character operates in Gothic fiction and Revolutionary War fiction reveal conflicting definitions of individuality and interiority. James Fenimore Cooper's tremendously unsuccessful attempt to combine the two genres into a single novel, Lionel Lincoln; Or, the Leaguer of Boston, stems from Gothic and military literature's incompatible visions of how much individuals—and particularly individual deaths—can be represented, mourned, and made to matter. Chapter Two focuses on setting, contrasting the places in which Gothic narratives and American Civil War narratives unfold. Whereas the haunted castles, houses, and forests of Gothic narrative imply a flattering (if eerie) perseverance of human history and memory, the material conditions of the Civil War—in which soldiers witnessed nature rapidly re-growing over the traces of battles fought only months prior—instead implied an amnesiac landscape that would rapidly swallow any traces of human event, however seemingly monumental. Ambrose Bierce's short story "A Tough Tussle" and Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage demonstrate the extent to which the Civil War made the landscape anti-Gothic for Americans. The third and final chapter compares the respective ethics of witness that underlie Gothic versus war fiction. American authors felt compelled to record the violence of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, but were wary of the accusations of sadism that routinely greeted the era's other major literary genre that centered on violence—the Gothic. To avoid such backlash, writers of war fiction actively contrasted their presentations of bloodshed and death with those of the Gothic, making use of two character types to parody the Gothic: the perverse doctor (whose fascination with bodily suffering mimics that of the Gothic reader, spellbound by tales of brutality) and the overly superstitious dupe (whose gullibility renders him vulnerable to hoax ghosts). By offering up these ridiculous anti-Gothic characters, Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, " James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy, Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches, and John William De Forest's Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty posit that Gothic literature's means of portraying and relating to violence are improper, and indeed dangerous, in wartime.

"Unformed Art: Bad Writing in the Modernist Novel" examines modes of writerly failure in the work of D. H. Lawrence, William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett in order to rethink the status of failure in modernist literary aesthetics. Modernism, I argue, has made us too comfortable with the idea of failure. Between its unprecedented embrace of formal deviance and its philosophical valorization of failure itself, the modernist novel has long taught readers to equate apparent breakdowns of narrative form with artistic sophistication. Meanwhile, formalist literary criticism—true to its modernist origins even when its theoretical affiliations lie elsewhere—has often perpetuated this positive view of failure by focusing on moments of rupture, discontinuity, obscurity, and incoherence and reading them as sites of heightened meaning and value. Opposing both of these traditions, "Unformed Art" uses the techniques of literary formalism to study instances of writerly failure that resist transformation into secret aesthetic successes. The first chapter analyzes D. H. Lawrence's radical experiment with narrative time in Women in Love and argues that this novel's polemical opposition to the notion of "form" itself accounts for its traditional exclusion from the modernist canon. Chapter 2 historicizes the occlusion of genuine writerly failure in formalist criticism amid the discipline's larger fetishization of formal deviance, linking these twinned developments to modernist practices of reading that are vividly dramatized in Faulkner's fiction. Finally, chapter 3 examines the strange persistence of a descriptive trope—photomimesis, or the description of light—in works by Joyce and Beckett that ostentatiously embrace stylistic failure. I argue that photomimesis troubles the theoretical consistency and aesthetic hierarchies of these works while also revealing a fundamental commitment to beauty and good-faith representation at the far extreme of modernist negativity. Together these chapters reestablish the centrality of genuine failure to our experience of art (even in modernism), while exploring a dimension of literary form that has traditionally marked a practical limit for the discipline of close reading

When John James Audubon wanted to make life-like paintings of birds, he killed them. Assembled during the first decades of western expansion, The Birds of America (1838) catalogues herons and hawks and species extinct within a century of its publication, and as often participates in the precariousness it hopes to suspend. "To Describe America, 1835-1941" explores a long century of American description, and brings together writers and artists whose work becomes an urgent attempt to capture fleeting experience and fragile object-life amid environmental and social loss. My chapters move through time and across genres to reveal a diversity of descriptive practice, and its response to an evolving national identity and sense of place. I show how geology, the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, and the sublimated violence of the Civil War shape landscape writing in the 1860s; how the twinned media of portraits and telescope photography describe what we cannot see; how the pioneering flash photographers George Shiras and Jacob Riis document disappearing Midwestern wilderness and tenement life in New York City at the turn of the century; how novelists, filmmakers, photographers, and WPA writers and artists adapt the nineteenth century panorama to depict natural and socioeconomic disaster in Depression-era California; and how United States Signal Service Corps records and the George R. Stewart novel Storm (1941) register an ambivalent relationship between science and belief, individual and climate

This dissertation uses a sustained examination of implicit models of cognition in nineteenth-century American fiction to construct a new narrative of the formation of the nineteenth-century literary canon and, by extension, to reevaluate the tradition of American "exceptionalism" in literary studies. Examining major texts of the nineteenth-century American canon from Charles Brockden Brown to Henry James, I find that these fictions evince a radical skepticism regarding explanatory constructs like beliefs, intentions, and motivations, often encouraging readers to understand characters' actions not in terms of internal mental states but as conditioned reflexes or, even more radically, as meaningless epiphenomena. The works examined herein not only undermine interiorizing psychological models through their revision and perversion of metaphors and genres that construct consciousness as private and propositional; many of them, like Poe's Dupin trilogy and Melville's "Bartleby, " also offer alternative methods of behavioral interpretation that emphasize material causation over agential action. Methodologically, this dissertation points toward a new understanding of the relation between literary studies and the social sciences, revealing that fictional representations of character can actively challenge the methods by which readers explain and predict other agents' behavior ― and that textual models of the mind constitute a rich and diverse archive of theories from which literary scholars can productively talk back to cognitive and social psychologists. The text's four chapters are thus organized by four prerequisites for any successful theory of mind: a metaphorical vocabulary with which to label minds and mental states; a narrative framework for subjective experience throughout the lifespan; a capacity to ask and answer "why" questions about human behavior; and a set of tools for manipulating other individuals, whether for prosocial or self-interested ends. While Mind-Reading in the Dark makes a targeted intervention in cognitive literary studies, the dissertation also has significant implications for the place of American studies in the larger field of world literature. My analysis suggests that morphological differences between American and British fiction registered by "exceptionalist" critics were indeed real -- but, rather than resulting from these traditions' supposed insulation from each other, they instead constitute a strategic response to their remarkable proximity and mutual imbrication. We can best understand the American canon's radical narrowing and revision in the early twentieth century as an adaptive attempt to recenter American fiction on these cognitively unconventional texts, transforming the United States' historically peripheral position in the Europe-centered literary system into an advantage. This dissertation thus asks us to view American literature as one peripheral tradition among many -- albeit one that attained global significance through a kind of strategic marginality.

Therapy and literature have a storied history, from the advent of psychoanalysis to the rise and fall of psychoanalytic literary criticism. Literary critics have debated the implications of therapeutic modes of narrating experience. They contend that by privileging individual psychology, therapy runs the risk of blinding individuals to the structural conditions that contribute to their mental distress, even as it might also develop therapeutic vernaculars that make people feel less alone. However, while studies have shown that certain literary genres can be therapeutic for specific readers, little work has explored how therapy influences literary form across genres and over the course of the 20th century. As a result, scholarship either measures how accurately literature represents a certain kind of therapy or maintains that a given genre is therapeutic for readers of specific classes and genders. Neither approach asks the deeper question: What does it mean—for literary history, contemporary theories of reading, and the mental health crisis—to argue for literature as a therapeutic endeavor? The Therapeutic Encounter remedies these gaps by situating the scene of analysis as both cause and effect: on the one hand, I show how historical sessions between analysts and analysands condition the creation of 20th-century literature. On the other, I demonstrate how 20th- and 21st-century literature creates the conditions of a therapeutic relationship with readers. In so doing, I reveal the often unexpected ways that therapy inflects literary form across genres, from diary and memoir to short story, novel, and play. The Therapeutic Encounter plumbs the paradoxical promise that dialogue, even if painful in the moment, reduces shared suffering in the long term. These dialogues can often lead us astray, whether we think too well of ourselves or shirk responsibility for making changes. Yet therapy is less terminable than interminable, not a one-stop cure but a reckoning: a salutary process of coming to understand ourselves in relation with others. Like therapy, reading literature can also be a process of learning to appreciate the conflicts and inconsistencies that arise when we discover we do not know ourselves as well as we tend to think we do

This dissertation examines a network of affiliations that emerged between a group of Asian American and Chinese diasporic writers and their nineteenth-century predecessors from the American Renaissance. In the twentieth century, Asian writers living in the West revived the defense of the free individual found in the Anglo-American tradition of liberalism in order to imagine new forms of provisional belonging in a pluralistic society. I draw on critical translation studies, postcolonial theory, and recent studies of the global Cold War in order to explore the links between the Asian American and Chinese diasporic traditions through their mutual commitment to redeploying ideas they encountered from the American canon. Sustained transhistorical exchanges with the literary past enabled Asian writers living in exile as well as their Asian American counterparts to articulate muted critiques of American capitalist hegemony as well as Communist repression in places like mainland China. Asian writers instrumentalized the defense of liberalism they encountered in the writings of Emerson, Whitman, Hawthorne, and Douglass in order to invent a vision of nonaligned selfhood that was global in its aspirations, even as it sought to challenge the exclusionary limits of nation-states, whether they were Communist totalitarian regimes or Western multicultural democracies

Averaging Americans: Literature, Statistics, and Inequality was sparked by a computational discovery I made in a corpus of more than 18,000 works of US fiction: statistical words such as average, normal, and typical distinguish postbellum fiction from its antecedents quantitatively and qualitatively. Averaging Americans explores how authors of the long nineteenth century used statistical thinking to rewrite American identity in ways that were both reactionary and radically egalitarian. This increasing dependence on statistical concepts at the same time that US fiction becomes polemically invested in realist representation is less a coincidence than an understudied fact of US literary history. I reveal how claims to representativeness take on aesthetic and political urgency amid struggles over citizenship, the biopolitics of population management, and the inequalities that define Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive Era. Critiquing claims to representativeness reveals how that concept is both central to yet undertheorized by literary studies. The average American may well be the long nineteenth century's most important fictional character

Since American ships began to enter the Pacific Ocean frontier at the turn of the nineteenth century, Pacific Islanders and voyagers from the West have engaged in increasingly complex forms of cross-cultural contact and exchange. The artifacts from these encounters exist in many forms: travelogues, maps, ethnographic accounts, works of popular literature, embodied practices such as tattooing, as well as a wide range of material culture, examples of which have entered museums around the world. In "Artifacts of Encounter, " I examine this circulation and exchange of people, ideas, and things—all of which take on multiple lives as they become embedded in the transnational circuits that link the Pacific with a modernizing world. The world of the Pacific becomes a constant site of negotiation, where indigenous and foreign conceptions of place and geography intersect and come into conflict as the scope of these encounters stretches across the last two centuries. The disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, history, and literature are brought to the fore to understand the complexity of these "Artifacts of Encounter." The dissertation's chapters are organized around four kinds of mapping that interweave indigenous and Western perspectives: early nineteenth-century American military exploits (1813); American "cultural" mapping of the Pacific by popular authors (1840-1851); the professionalization of anthropological accounts from the nineteenth into the early twentieth century; and finally, geographies of indigenous protest in the contemporary Pacific