Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

5-1998

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

George Hutchinson

Committee Members

Alison Ensor, Michael Lofaro, Bruce Wheeler

Abstract

This dissertation examines the Journals of Lewis and Clark within the contexts of history and culture. There is an emphasis on shaping cultural practices at work anterior to the Journals within the realms of print culture, of science and scientific institutions, of the nascent discipline of anthropology, of Jeffersonian land theory. There is an attempt to re-align one's reading of the Journals from a meta-narrative, whether romantic or imperialist, to one more relational in terms of contemporary expectations and realities. The Jeffersonian mandate was a determining factor in the Corps of Discovery's encounters with native peoples and its recording of the West. In executing that mandate, Lewis and Clark enter the on-going dialectic of interloper, native, and environment that contributes so much to an evolving American identity in the early national period. The early print history of the Journals, the Corps' scientific accomplishments and failures, the ethnography of Native Americans, and the relation of Jefferson and the Captains to the land are each examined within their historical contexts and cultural antecedents. It is within this complex of factors and the clarified relation of each to each, that one finds a new reading of the Journals, more open-ended and more apposite to their historical moment. Jefferson conceived the West as a space for resolving socio-economic problems of the new republic while the Journals are a pragmatic, functional, empirical account of an adventure that can only have happened once.

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