Cox, John D.

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Cox, John D.

PERSONAL:

Education: University of Mississippi, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Georgia College and State University, Campus Box 44, Milledgeville, GA 31061. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Georgia College and State University, Milledgeville, associate professor of English.

WRITINGS:

Traveling South: Travel Narratives and the Construction of American Identity, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

John D. Cox's first book, Traveling South: Travel Narratives and the Construction of American Identity, explores "intranational" writings of the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War that helped form the nascent country's national identity. Cox mines slave narratives, women's diaries, soldiers' diaries, and travel writings of northerners investigating the culture of the South to explain the ideals that led to the concepts of freedom and the American Dream and the value given to regional locations and individuality that differed radically from previous European notions.

Cox begins by examining the writings of J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur, the French-American author of the popular 1782 book Letters from an American Farmer, which introduced Europeans to the idea of the American Dream, the bounty of the New World, and the radical notion of self-directed travel. Next, Cox examines the work of William Bartram, a naturalist from Pennsylvania who undertook a four-year tour of the Southern colonies beginning in 1733. The slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and the travel diary of abolitionist Fanny Kemble act as counterpoints to these bourgeois epistles, and the journals of Union soldiers during the Civil War bring to light the cherished hope of turning the South into an economic force that mirrored the North.

Cox describes the various types of boundaries these writers cross—geographical, social, racial, and philosophical—the result being the formation of American identity. "The book has a fresh quality," wrote Kevin E. O'Donnell in the Journal of Southern History, "considering its eclecticism and its willingness to examine familiar texts through an unfamiliar lens." O'Donnell concluded that "Cox's grasp of travel-writing theory and criticism is substantial."

Though several critics questioned Cox's inclusion of slave narratives and soldiers' diaries as a form of travel writing, Edlie L. Wong's review in Biography stated that "the book's most cogent conclusions remain those that consider the fundamental contradictions inherent in the American ideology of free travel."