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Conclusion [I]t is difficult to stay in one place when meditating on the issue of travel. georges van den abbeele As I have argued throughout this work, travel literature played an integral role in the struggle to create a national identity. Between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, numerous northern travelers headed south to investigate the region that was widely seen to constitute the primary barrier to a clearly unified national culture. While previous studies have investigated the function of travel narratives in the evolving understanding of the characteristics of this American nation , most of these works have defined “travel literature” very narrowly and thus included only those texts describing, for instance, leisure travel across national borders. But travel literature shouldn’t be defined so restrictively, as individuals travel for myriad reasons and produce numerous types of text. Even when many of their movements are restricted by factors larger than themselves—slavery, the military, gender ideology—individual travelers have often been able to determine how or why they journey, if not where they are moved. As a result of these considerations, I have sought to broaden the parameters of “travel literature” and to analyze texts not frequently viewed within this generic category. Of course, as much recent work with travel texts has argued, previous attempts to define “travel literature” have frequently depended on unstable or theoretically unsophisticated distinctions, but if the category is expanded too widely, “travel literature” is in danger of disappearing as a useful critical term. In fact, according to Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs in the introduction to their recent Perspectives on Travel Writing, “The point to determine, therefore, is whether travel writing is really a genre at all” (13). It is not a distinct genre, they conclude; rather, “travel writing” should be thought of as “a collective term for a variety of texts both predominantly fictional and non-fictional whose main theme is travel” (13). That is, Hooper and Youngs believe the borders of “travel literature” territory should be enlarged even further than I have defined it in my own work, to include additional types of works, including obviously fictional texts. While I am not ready to dispense entirely with “travel literature” as a distinct category, I do appreciate the benefits in using the travel paradigm to analyze a 194 conclusion variety of texts, both nonfictional and fictional. For example, during the decades following the Civil War, the cultural work that had been performed by the texts of Bartram, Northup, Kemble, Jacobs, Olmsted, or the others I have discussed was perhaps continued most obviously by the vast amount of regional writing published, for the nation’s most important literary magazines regularly featured regional fiction along with other travel pieces.1 During the years between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, northerners had turned to travel literature for information about the South, but their desire to understand more fully this “internal Other” was satisfied after the Civil War to an increasing degree not solely by the literature of travel but also by the writings of the nation’s regional authors. One of the most popular at the time was Mary Noailles Murfree, who, between 1884 and her death in 1921, published stories in a number of the nation ’s leading literary and cultural journals, including Lippincott’s and Atlantic Monthly, and authored eighteen novels and six collections of short stories. Writing under the pseudonym Charles Egbert Craddock, Murfree introduced a host of colorful “backwoods” Tennessee mountain folk to the nation’s urban readers , who eagerly consumed Murfree’s literary offerings; In the Tennessee Mountains , published in 1884, “went through seventeen editions in its first two years” (Brodhead 118). Many of Murfree’s tales, while not literally true, certain resemble travel literature and can be read productively in these terms. Murfree’s famous story “The Dancin’ Party at Harrison’s Cove,” originally published by Atlantic Monthly in 1878 and later included in In the Tennessee Mountains, is exemplary of her early tales. The story is set in the southern mountains at a fashionable watering hole, in the log cabins of neighboring families, and along the mountain paths connecting these locales. Two groups are clearly delineated: the “mountain people” who live permanently in the area and the “summer sojourners” visiting “New Helvetia Springs” for a break from their city lives (Craddock 216). The narrator, who is never named, is obviously educated and purports to provide special information about both the area...

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