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Epilogue In this book I have tried to shed new light on the “American Renaissance” by showing how writers like Melville, Thoreau, and Fuller addressed the problem of their nation’s size and shape. Some of their most important insights and formal innovations emerged, as we saw, from their engagement with various cultural mechanisms for assuaging anxiety about the nation’s constantly expanding borders—mechanisms that both fascinated and appalled them. We have also seen how a relatively ‹xed, visualizable form, represented by maps and in various other kinds of printed materials, was a crucial component of nation formation. American texts following the Civil War, by contrast, manifest a new complacency about the nation’s now seemingly ‹xed and unalterable form. While some of the same tropes appear in them as in antebellum writings— Frederick Jackson Turner’s use of the body politic metaphor, for example —they no longer re›ect anxiety about formlessness or overly rapid growth. At the same time, particular kinds of texts that emerged in tandem with Americans’ obsession with national form disappeared altogether. As panoramas lost their status as stand-alone attractions and became merely one element in variety shows, the accompanying pamphlets, which trained readers to see land in particular ways, were no longer produced. Today, of course, boundaries and geographical space are once again vexing problems in many parts of the world. Globalization has at times caused national borders to seem increasingly insigni‹cant. Treaties like the North American and the Central American Free Trade Agreement allow businesses to operate more or less as if national boundaries within North America did not exist, even as American policy has been to restrict border crossings by individuals. The fall of the Soviet Union and the resultant 136 resurgence of nationalisms in eastern Europe, on the other hand, have given new importance to national boundaries, and in some cases have caused them to be redrawn. Ethnic con›icts in other parts of the world, too, have called into question the extent to which lines on of‹cial maps re›ect current allegiances, self-images, and lived experiences of real human beings. Even in the United States, which has sometimes seemed immune from the violence and chaos prevalent in other parts of the world, regional tensions have emerged in a new form in the last decade. Pundits and citizens alike now see the nation as divided into “red states” and “blue states.” Not since the Civil War have divisions within the body politic been so coextensive with geography. As I wrote this book, it was impossible not to hear echoes of the 1840s and 1850s in contemporary century rhetoric. When I hear George Bush express his desire to make “our borders something more than lines on a map,” I have a hard time not thinking of William Ellery Channing’s fear that the boundaries of Texas and Mexico will become “little more than lines on the sand of the sea-shore.”1 The echo is, of course, incongruous. How unlikely it is that the liberal Unitarian clergyman from Boston could have imagined, in 1844, that Texas—then an independent nation—would a century and a half later produce a president of the United States, much less one with whom he would share an anxiety about the very same southern border. What is really important about the echo, however, is that two so very different men should both have expressed concern about the potential meaninglessness of borders. Both urgently want the nation’s boundaries to be something more than lines on a map. But isn’t that what national boundaries are? The texts I have analyzed here remind us that the categories by means of which we make space meaningful—nation, border, latitude, parallel , meridian, and so on—are products of the human imagination. We make them rather than ‹nd them, just as we create metaphors such as the body politic. Even notions like near and far, Thoreau reminds us, are relative , dependent upon individual perceptions and assumptions. These texts also remind us, however, that human beings have a deep investment in seeing those categories as natural. Because place is such an important component of human identity, we prefer to see such categories as given, rather than made. It is a creative tension, and in the antebellum United States it led to the production of a rich array of texts, some representing the means by which space was symbolically appropriated and others questioning those means. Such texts themselves...

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