Traveling South: Travel Narratives and the Construction of American Identity.

Traveling South: Travel Narratives and the Construction of American Identity. By John D. Cox. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 2005. Pp. [xii], 252. $39.95, ISBN 0-8203-2765-4.)

In Traveling South: Travel Narratives and the Construction of American Identity, John D. Cox discusses a number of important nonfiction texts written between the Revolutionary period and the end of the Civil War. Most of these have not been conventionally regarded as travel narratives. Yet most were written by northerners traveling through and reporting on the American South. Cox refers to such work as "intranational travel writing" (p. 2). As his subtitle suggests, Cox's general thesis is that these writings helped to cement Americans' emerging sense of national identity.

Of the book's five chapters, the first three consider writings that have become staples of American literature anthologies: Chapter 1 is about the Travels of William Bartram and Letters' from an American Farmer, by J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur. Chapter 2 discusses the slavery and escape narratives of Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northup. Chapter 3 considers the journal of Georgia plantation mistress Fanny Kemble and the now famous narrative by former slave Harriet Jacobs. The final two chapters consider works that are not as familiar to students of American literature, though they are well known to historians: Frederick Law Olmsted's writings on the South--most notably The Cotton Kingdom (chapter 4); and various letters, diaries, and reports written by Union soldiers about their experiences in the South during the Civil War (chapter 5).

Cox is an assistant professor of English, and his method is generally that of a literary scholar. He reads his primary texts closely in light of selected literary theory while quoting liberally in order to develop his themes. In this case, the theory in question is the considerable body of travel-writing theory and scholarship that has emerged in recent years within the disciplines of history, literary and cultural studies, and post-colonial theory.

The book has a fresh quality, considering its eclecticism and its willingness to examine familiar texts through an unfamiliar lens. Cox's grasp of travel-writing theory and criticism is substantial. His knowledge of American travel narratives and of the history of travel and tourism in the U.S., however, is not quite so strong. The result is that some of his close readings take place in a contextual vacuum. For example, at one point, Cox discusses the descriptions of Lookout Mountain, near Chattanooga, Tennessee, from the published reminiscences of a Union soldier, George Pepper. Cox seems unaware that Pepper's prose echoes descriptions of that same region written by Charles Lanman, I. A. Richards, and numerous other writers whose travel articles about the region were widely circulated in northern newspapers and magazines before the war. And Cox remarks that Pepper and his fellow soldiers imagined themselves as "the first wave of sightseeing tourists," without acknowledging that the region already had a burgeoning travel industry during the antebellum period (p. 179).

KEVIN E. O'DONNELL

East Tennessee State University