By William E. Lenz
ISBN-10: 1433123312
ISBN-13: 9781433123313
As American literary and cultural students re-examine the rules of U.S. family with different international locations, Ruins, Revolution, and occur future: John Lloyd Stephens Creates the Maya locates in Stephens’s immensely renowned nineteenth-century trip narratives (1841, 1843) the resources of yankee perceptions of primary the United States and contributes on to present redefinitions of yank nationalism, appear future, and hemispheric imperialism. The examine demanding situations sleek readers to ascertain significantly the cultural stereotypes that the 19th century embraced and that regularly shaped the root for nationwide coverage. through examining Stephens heavily, by way of finding him inside a bigger cultural discussion approximately such the most important matters as nationwide identification, race family members, take place future, and historic illustration, we will larger comprehend earlier and current nationwide attitudes towards peoples and countries south of the U.S. territorial border. waiting for a few of the concerns that may supply upward thrust to the battle with Mexico after which to the U.S. Civil struggle, Stephens sees the racial panorama of relevant the USA in stark different types. Writing trip narratives approximately imperative the United States and studying narratives written through an American touring in crucial the US are acts of cultural imperialism that bring about either author and reader implicitly owning valuable the USA, soaking up its Mayan background and modern range into an American nationwide mythology. primary the USA turns into, via Stephens’s acts of exploring and inscribing, an creative extension of the us and the Maya, the unique New international americans. Ruins, Revolution, and show up Destiny encourages twenty-first-century readers to untangle those frequently conflicting acts of exploration, inscription, and mind's eye.
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Extra info for Ruins, Revolution, and Manifest Destiny: John Lloyd Stephens Creates the Maya
Sample text
John Lloyd Stephens had exactly the same problem in the nineteenth century: how to interpret what he saw with his eyes, how to judge what was “true,” how to present in his narrative what he saw as “real,” and how to communicate the reality and truth of what he experienced as meaningful and engaging to the American public back in New York. And this reminds me that the impulse to pick up a seashell or a bit of Mayan pottery is akin to the impulse to carve your name into a temple wall: like Stephens and countless other explorers, we all want to prove we were there, and preferably the first to have been there, that our travels were real, that we have brought back proof of our perceptions, our narratives, our stories.
Maintenance of cultural ideologies such as the Monroe Doctrine requires a motivated blindness, an ability at once to recognize a contradiction and to forget its existence” (60). Stephens feels anxiety about class, for American society in post-Jacksonian America is concerned about the rise of the Mobocracy. In addition, the boom and bust cycles have tried American confidence; the Panic of 1837 was still affecting American businesses and many peoples’ daily lives. To be arrested by an illiterate mob who cannot even read his passport, to be threatened by mob violence against all foreigners, all aristocrats, all whites; these moments must have made him reflect upon the disparate and unequal nature of American democracy in spite of his own Jacksonian leanings.
Stephens’ Incidents, like most nineteenth-century travel narratives, is organized in a linear, chronological sequence of events. The text provides essentially a diaristic day-to-day record of Stephens’ travels, and holds up as a governing principle the presentation of unembellished truth. The book includes maps and the reader can follow, if persistent and imaginative, Stephens’ progress from point to point. (Three contemporary accounts that focus on retracing Stephens’ travels are Anne and Myron Sutton, Among the Maya Ruins [1967], Jennifer L.
Ruins, Revolution, and Manifest Destiny: John Lloyd Stephens Creates the Maya by William E. Lenz
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