Crossing the Caribbean
Crossing the Caribbean
Southerners Write the Mexican American War
This chapter rehearses the myriad ways in which the U.S. Mexican War brought about a new awareness of the Caribbean on the part of Southern combatants, who crossed its waters and experienced its cultures, which seemed both strange and familiar. U.S. concepts of Mexico - many of them drawn from Prescott’s monumental The Conquest of Mexico - are examined, alongside a portrayal of the ways in which the doctrine of manifest destiny shaped and influenced both the conduct of the war and modes of describing it. Mention is made of many of the writers who wrote about the war, many of whom never went to Mexico. The chapter builds to a reading of two military memories by Raphael Semmes and Arthur Manigualt, and concludes with a presentation of Colonel William C. Falkner’s sensationist novel, The Spanish Heroine, which influenced the Colonel’s great-grandson, William Faulkner. The concept of the “tropical sublime” receives a full illustration here.
Keywords: U.S. Mexican War, tropical sublime, military memoirs, novels of sensation, manifest destiny, sexual stereotyping
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