Voyages through Literary Space: Mapping Globe and Nation in Richard Henry Dana’s ‘Two Years Before the Mast

Abstract

In his youth, Richard Henry Dana Jr. rebelled against the conventions of his upper-class
New England upbringing when he signed on as a common sailor on a merchant ship bound for Alta
California. The notes of his travels describe the strenuous life at sea, a captain’s sadistic streak,
a crew’s mutinous tendencies, and California’s multicultural fur trade economy. First published
in 1840, Dana’s travelogue Two Years Before the Mast became an unofficial guide for emigrants
traversing the largely unmapped far western territories in the wake of the Mexican-American War.
Connecting Dana’s widely-read narrative to current developments in the discipline, this article
discusses strategies of visualizing literature and includes an exercise in ‘discursively mapping’ actual and imagined spaces and mobilities of the text. Considering strategies and toolsets from the digital humanities as well as theories such as Lefebvre’s concept of representational space, the article reflects on the methodological and practical pitfalls brought about by the visualization of spatial imaginations as part of a more digitally literate and spatially conscious American Studies.

Biographical Note

Dr. Steffen Adrian Wöll (SFB 1199 & Leipzig University)

Employed at SFB 1199 since October 2016, I’ve contributed my American Studies background to a sub project, finishing with a dissertation titled “The West and the Word: Imagining, Formatting, and Ordering the American West in Nineteenth-Century Cultural Discourse.” Starting in 2020, I’m employed as a postdoctoral researcher in the follow-up project that involves the study of US transoceanic expansion between 1880-1940 and its representation and construction in literature and other cultural texts. These studies bring to the fore discursive dynamics and intersections between spatial imaginations of the transpacific and circum-caribbean spaces, as well as their connections at geo-strategic junctions such as the Panama Canal. Next to the analysis of spatial imaginations, formats, and orders, I’m interested in representations of agency, race, and otherness in US literature and culture. Articles about these and other subjects have appeared in several journals and volumes.