Introduction

Abstract

Like many previous investigations of american culture this one is about individualism. It is an old subject but still worth exploring, for one of the nation’s ruling myths continues to be that the self-contained individual is unconstrained by society, culture, and history. This is evident in the emphasis placed on autonomy by those seminal voices of American studies that manufactured the canon by defining “true” American literature as promoting the individual and democracy, with the caveat that freedom and selfhood are possible only outside of and away from the demands of a society external to the self.¹ In 1954 R.W.B. Lewis famously articulated a key element of this mythos he calls “strategic distance”: “The individual in America has usually taken his start outside society … and if he does get inside, it makes a difference whether he is walking into a trap or discovering the setting in which to realize his own freedom” (101). Such a stance ossified the relationship between individualism and American literature, but that could only be accomplished by ignoring, in effect silencing, any qualities of the texts that contradicted the belief. This book joins that past work, intent on reexamining and demystifying the search for autonomy through a personally chosen physical and psychic displacement; it hopes to further complicate not only faith in a naturalized self untouched by structural forces but overly optimistic assumptions about the politics of voluntary marginality.