THE ISLAND AND THE MOUND : AN ESSAY IN LITERARY TYPOLOGY
Résumé
This essay in literary topology focuses on two particular loci of the imaginary geography of the New World – the river island and the mound, its terra firma counterpart and an outcropping of the past – both “story-telling places” (G. Bachelard) i.e. inducing tales and narratives. The Mississippi island and the Indian mound are the locale of both a celebration and a debunking of the American Pastoral; they reveal that there lies at the heart of the national past not an original innocence but a primal guilt and remind one of how the New World, a Promised Land, an Eldorado, was turned into a “Helldorado” by History. Both these examples prove that there exists “a moral geography of the American imagination”.
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