Projekt

The project investigates the strategy of "pastifying" French Americans (Creoles) and French-American culture in selected illustrated fictional and non-fictional texts about New Orleans (travel writing, short fiction, serialized novels, and historical essays) from one of the leading 19th-century American periodicals, Scribner's Monthly/The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. The project's goals are fourfold: first, while previous research on these texts has largely ignored their periodical origins or has merely placed individual texts in the context of the magazine, "Scribner's Illustrated New Orleans" re-situates all New Orleans texts published in the magazine within their periodical context. This particularly implies taking into account the illustrations with which these texts were originally published, but which were regularly omitted in subsequent republications and ignored in critical analyses. Therefore, and second, the project also restores Scribner's/The Century's New Orleans texts to their multimedial origins, examining how texts and illustrations interacted. Thus, and third, "Scribner's Illustrated New Orleans" traces the multimedial (textual and pictorial) discussion about New Orleans and its culture which took place in the pages of Scribner's/The Century from the 1870s to the 1890s, pointing out convergences and discrepancies between the individual texts and how each text and each picture contributed to the magazine's view of New Orleans and its culture. Finally, the project identifies "pastifying" as a discursive strategy of containing cultural 'Otherness' that on the one hand distinguishes late 19th-century New Orleans writings and images from other Gilded Age regionalist texts (especially so-called local-color fiction from other American regions) and that on the other hand would later also be employed in other contexts and media to order cultures hierarchically according to temporal categories (past/subordinate vs. present and future/dominant).

• Dr. Florian Freitag

  Universität Mainz
  FB 06
  Amerikanistik
  Germersheim