Moving Encounters: Sympathy and the Indian Question in Antebellum Literature

Description

Details not only how such writers as James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft forecast the inevitable demise of Indian-white sympathy, but also how authors like Lydia Maria Child and William Apess insisted that a language of feeling could be used to create shared community or defend American Indian sovereignty. Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: The Moving Encounter in Antebellum Literature 1. The Evolution of Moving Encounters in Lydia Maria Child’s American Indian Writings, 1824–1870 2. Doomed Sympathy and The Prairie: Rereading Natty Bumppo as a Sentimental Intermediary 3. “Be man!”: Emasculating Sympathy and the Southern Patriarchal Response in the Fiction of William Gilmore Simms 4. Containing Native Feeling: Sentiment in the Autobiographies of William Apess, Mary Jemison, and Black Hawk 5. The Book, the Poet, the Indian: Transcendental Intermediaries in Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes and Henry David Thoreau’s The Maine Woods 6. “Sorrows in excess!”: The Limits of Sympathy in the Ethnography of George Catlin, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft 7. Restoring the Noahic Family: The Three Races of America in Mary Eastman’s Aunt Phillis’s Cabin and Mary Howard Schoolcraft’s The Black Gauntlet 8. Staging Encounters and Reclaiming Sympathy through Indian Melodramas and Parodies, 1821–1855 Conclusion: Moving beyond Sentiment or Cynicism Notes Index