Publication Date

2019

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

First Advisor

Einboden, Jeffrey

Degree Name

Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy)

Legacy Department

Department of English

Abstract

This dissertation examines how American sea writers between 1824 and 1914 promoted new perceptions of English as a various and expanding intercultural and international language. It argues that presentations of language contact form a critically underemphasized component of American nautical literature. It surveys how such presentations take shape in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot (1824) and The Crater (1847), Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), and Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years before the Mast (1840). It asserts that Herman Melville’s innovative presentations of contact between pidgins and native varieties of English in Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) finesse the extended dramatic irony in both stories and increase awareness of language variation in maritime domains. Following a survey of Melville’s explorations of English as a contact medium in Mardi (1849), Redburn (1849), and White-Jacket (1850), the study performs a philological rereading of Moby-Dick (1851). It critically reexamines linguistic details in the varied sources informing the book’s “Etymology” section, reconnects the work to nineteenth-century trends in language scholarship, and underscores the narrative’s profound and comic investigations of lexical authority, contact-based usage, and contextual meaning. The study then excavates signs of Melville’s philologically-grounded influence on American sea writing during the period between the publication of Moby-Dick and the budding of the Melville Revival in the early twentieth century. It brings to light presentations of speech varieties in contact in neglected mass-market sea fictions by Roger Starbuck and uncovers revealing allusions to Melville’s sea novels in several of Starbuck’s 1860s pieces. Reporting results from the project’s corpus-based analyses of dialogue in digitized versions of three of Starbuck’s dime novels, the dissertation also illuminates how Starbuck’s works systematically create close connections between presented speech and characterization. Finally, the dissertation surveys related echoes of Melville’s sea fictions in six additional post-1851 works of nautical writing: Martin Robinson Delany’s Blake; or the Huts of America (1859-1862); Celia Laighton Thaxter’s Among the Isles of Shoals (1873); Frank Norris’s Moran of the Lady Letty (1898); and Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf (1904), Martin Eden (1909), and The Mutiny of the Elsinore (1914). In the end, this dissertation contributes critical insights and archival findings to enhance studies of Melville, the development of American sea literature, corpus stylistics, dime novels, and portrayals of English in historical situations of language contact.

Extent

317 pages

Language

eng

Publisher

Northern Illinois University

Rights Statement

In Copyright

Rights Statement 2

NIU theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from Huskie Commons for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without the written permission of the authors.

Media Type

Text

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