From Knight Errant to Exploring Pioneer: The Influence of Medieval Romances on the Depiction of Human and Non-Human Others in John Filson’s “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon”

Giulia Magro

doi:10.31261/rias.13429

Published: 2022-12-31

Vol. 15 No. 2 (2022)

From Knight Errant to Exploring Pioneer: The Influence of Medieval Romances on the Depiction of Human and Non-Human Others in John Filson’s “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon”

Giulia Magro

Section: VARIA

https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.13429

Abstract

This article analyzes, through a comparative approach, a frontier narrative, John Filson’s “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon” (1784), in relation to selected medieval chivalric romances from an ecocritical perspective, exploring the way in which medieval patterns have been employed in the American mythopoeic process, especially in relation to the frontier and the wilderness myths. In fact, medievalist narratives have been often employed to justify an anthropocentric, expansionist, and imperialistic agenda with grievous consequences on the way in which Americans engage with nature and with nonhuman species. At the same time, this tendency is often accompanied by an androcentric and ethnocentric rhetoric, contributing to the marginalization from dominant national discourses of significant sections of the population due to their race and gender. For this reason, attention will be also given to how attitudes toward the nonhuman can reflect and bear an impact on those toward other humans. By investigating how narratives develop, evolve, and circulate across time and space, it becomes possible to reveal the harmful logic they carry, and stress the importance of shifting the narrative in the direction of more sustainable intra- and inter-species relations.

Keywords:

Medievalism , Frontier Narratives , Early American Literature , Ecocriticism

Download files

Download PDF

Citation rules

Magro, G. (2022). From Knight Errant to Exploring Pioneer: The Influence of Medieval Romances on the Depiction of Human and Non-Human Others in John Filson’s “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon”. Review of International American Studies, 15(2), 187–210. https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.13429

Cited by / Share

References

Aberth, John. An Environmental History of the Middle Ages: The Crucible of Nature. Routledge, 2013.
Google Scholar

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946). Translated by Willard R. Trask, Princeton University Press, 2003.
Google Scholar

Bakeless, John E. “The Pioneers.” Port Folio 15, 1823, pp. 230–248.
Google Scholar

Bernheimer, Richard. Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology. Harvard University Press, 1952.
Google Scholar

Boitani, Piero. Letteratura Europea e Medioevo volgare. Il Mulino, 2007.
Google Scholar

Bolt, Barbara L. Of Wilderness, Forest, and Garden: An Eco-Theory of Genre in Middle English Literature. University of South Carolina, 2015. PhD dissertation. Scholar Commons, https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4134&context=etd
Google Scholar

Bradford, William. Of Plimoth Plantation. 1651. Wright and Potter Printing Co., 1898.
Google Scholar

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995.
Google Scholar

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 2, 2009, pp. 197–222. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/596640
Google Scholar

Chrétien de Troyes. Perceval: The Story of the Grail. Late twelfth century. Translated by Burton Raffel, Yale University Press, 1999.
Google Scholar

Chrétien de Troyes. Yvain, or The Knight of the Lion. Late twelfth century. Translated by A.S. Kline, Poetry in Translation, 2018.
Google Scholar

Clark, Timothy. The Value of Ecocriticism. Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Google Scholar

Classen, Albrecht. “Self and Other in the Arthurian World: Heinrich von dem Türlin’s ‘Wunderketten’.” Monatshefte, Vol. 96, No. 1, 2004, pp. 20–39. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/30157743
Google Scholar

Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. W. W. Norton and Co., 1996.
Google Scholar

Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. 1948. Princeton University Press, 1973.
Google Scholar

Faragher, John Mack. “They May Say What They Please: Daniel Boone and the Evidence.” The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Vol. 88, No. 4, 1990, pp. 373–393. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23381897
Google Scholar

Ferlampin-Acher, Christine. “The Natural World.” Handbook of Arthurian Romance: King Arthur’s Court in Medieval European Literature, edited by Johnny McFadyen and Leah Tether, De Gruyter, 2017.
Google Scholar

Filson, John. The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke (1784): An Online Electronic Text Edition. Edited by Paul Royster, Electronic Texts in American Studies, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=etas
Google Scholar

Flint, Timothy. The First White Man of the West: Or, The Life and Exploits of Col. Dan’l Boone, the First Settler of Kentucky; Interspersed with Incidents in the Early Annals of the Country. George Conclin, 1847.
Google Scholar

Frye, Steven. “’Manifest Ambivalence’: James Fenimore Cooper, the American Romance, and the Metahistories of Hegel and Herder.” The Kentucky Review, Vol. 14, No. 2, art. 4, 1999, pp. 32–53. UKnowledge, https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kentucky-review/vol14/iss2/4. Accessed 19 Oct. 2022.
Google Scholar

Gabriele, Matthew. “Trump says medieval walls worked. They didn’t.” Washington Post, 10 January 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/01/10/trump-says-medieval-walls-worked-they-didnt. Accessed 19 Oct. 2022.
Google Scholar

Geoffrey of Monmouth. Historia Regum Britanniae. Early twelfth century. Translated by Lewis Thorpe, Penguin Books, 1966.
Google Scholar

George, Michael W. “Gawain’s Struggle with Ecology: Attitudes toward the Natural World in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” The Journal of Ecocriticism, Vol. 2, No. 2, July 2010, pp. 30–44. https://www.csub.edu/~cmacquarrie/isle_of_man/documents/george.pdf. Accessed 19 Oct. 2022.
Google Scholar

Georgi-Findlay, Brigitte. The Frontiers of Women’s Writing: Women’s Narratives and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion. University of Arizona Press, 1996.
Google Scholar

Gottfried von Strassburg. Tristan. Thirteenth century. Translated by A. T. Hatto, Penguin, 1960.
Google Scholar

Hallock, Thomas. From the Fallen Tree: Frontier Narratives, Environmental Politics, and the Roots of a National Pastoral, 1749–1826. University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Google Scholar

Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.
Google Scholar

Harrison, Robert Pogue. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Google Scholar

Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Toward a Recognition of Androgyny. Alfred A. Knopf, 1973.
Google Scholar

Herlihy, D. J. “Attitudes toward the Environment in Medieval Society.” Historical Ecology: Essays on Environment and Social Change, edited by Lester J. Bilsky, Kennikat Press, 1980.
Google Scholar

Herman, Daniel J. “The Other Daniel Boone: The Nascence of a Middle-Class Hunter Hero, 1784- 1860.” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 18, No. 3, 1998, pp. 429–457. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3124673
Google Scholar

Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2015.
Google Scholar

Kaeuper, Richard. “The Societal Role of Chivalry in Romance: Northwestern Europe.” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, edited by Roberta L. Krueger, Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Google Scholar

Keegan, John. The Mask of Command. Viking Penguin Inc., 1987.
Google Scholar

Kolodny, Annette. The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860. The University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
Google Scholar

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press, 1993.
Google Scholar

Limerick, Patricia Nelson. Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West. Norton, 2000
Google Scholar

Long, Charles. Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. Fortress Press, 1986.
Google Scholar

Lupack, Alan. The Oxford Guide to Arthurian Literature and Legend. Oxford University Press, 2007.
Google Scholar

Malory, Thomas. Le Morte D’Arthur. 1485. Global Grey E-books, 2019.
Google Scholar

Mather, Cotton. The Wonders of the Invisible World. 1690. Electronic Texts in American Studies. 19, 1998, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&context=etas
Google Scholar

Moncrief, L. W. (1970). “The Cultural Basis of our Environmental Crisis.” Science, Vol. 170, No. 2957, pp. 508–512. DOI: 10.1126/science.170.3957.508
Google Scholar

Morton, Timothy. Hype objects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Google Scholar

Moskowitz, Jennifer. “The Cultural Myth of the Cowboy, or, How the West Was Won.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2006. https://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/spring_2006/moskowitz.htm
Google Scholar

Muldoon, Mark. “Environmental Decline and Christian Contemplation.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2003, pp.75–96. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/44086144
Google Scholar

Nicholas L. Paul. “Modern Intolerance and the Medieval Crusades.” Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past, edited by Andrew Albin et al., Fordham Univeristy Press, 2019.
Google Scholar

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2013.
Google Scholar

Personal Narratives Group, editor. Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narrative. Indiana University Press, 1989
Google Scholar

Ray, Sarah Jaquette. The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture. University of Arizona Press, 2013.
Google Scholar

Rosenthal, Bernard, and Paul E. Szarmach, editors. Medievalism in American Culture. Papers of the Eighteenth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies. Medieval Renaissance Texts and Studies, Vol. 55, 1989.
Google Scholar

Salisbury, Joyce E., editor. The Medieval World of Nature: A Book of Essays. Garland, 1993.
Google Scholar

Saunders, Corinne J. The Forest of Medieval Romance. D.S. Brewer, 1993.
Google Scholar

Simms, William Gilmore. Views and Reviews in American Literature, History and Fiction. 1845. Edited by C. Hugh Holman, Harvard University Press, 1962.
Google Scholar

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Late fourteenth century. Translated by Marie Borroff, Norton, 1967.
Google Scholar

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Wesleyan University Press, 1973.
Google Scholar

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. 1950. Harvard University Press, 1978.
Google Scholar

Sparks, Jared. The Library of American Biography, Vol. 23, Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1847.
Google Scholar

Stuhmiller, Jacqueline. The Hunt in Romance and the Hunt as Romance. Cornell University, 2005. PhD dissertation. eCommons, https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/239
Google Scholar

Sturgeon, Noël. Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Natural. University of Arizona Press, 2009.
Google Scholar

Swearingen, James E. and Joanne Cutting-Gray. “Cooper’s Pathfinder: Revising Historical Understanding.” New Literary History, Vol. 23, No. 2, 1992, pp. 267–280. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/469234
Google Scholar

Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Government Printing Office, 1894.
Google Scholar

Wheeler, Bonnie. “The Masculinity of King Arthur: From Gildas to the Nuclear Age.” Quondam et Futurus, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1992, pp. 1–26. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27870210
Google Scholar

White, Lynn, Jr. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Science, Vol. 155, No. 3767, 1967, pp. 1203–1207. DOI: 10.1126/science.155.3767.1203
Google Scholar

White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region. Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Google Scholar

Wilson, Edward O. In Search of Nature. Island Press, 1996.
Google Scholar

Giulia Magro

giulia.magro@uniroma1.it
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9048-8278

Affiliation:

Sapienza University of Rome & University of Silesia in Katowice Italy

Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)

Giulia Magro is a Ph.D. student in Studies in English Literatures, Cultures, Language and Translation (Literary and Cultural Studies curriculum) at the Sapienza University of Rome and at the University of Silesia in Katowice. She graduated with a Master of Arts in Linguistic, Literary and Translation Studies at the Sapienza University of Rome, with a dissertation titled “The Knight Keeps Setting Forth: An Analysis of the Continuity of Medieval Chivalric Romances in American Literature.” During her Master of Arts degree, she studied abroad at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. for nine months, thanks to the Erasmus Plus program. In May 2021, she participated to the masterclass “Key Concepts in World Literature and the Environmental Humanities,” organized by the Sapienza University of Rome. During the first year of her Ph.D., currently in progress, she has taken part in multiple seminars at Sapienza University of Rome and attended the course "Intellectual Property Law" organized by the University of Silesia (Katowice). Her research interests include the impact of medievalism on American literature and culture, focusing in particular on speculative fiction and science fiction, and ecocritical and posthumanist approaches.

Vol. 15 No. 2 (2022)
Published: 2022-12-31

eISSN: 1991-2773

10.31261/RIAS

Publisher

University of Silesia Press

Submit

From Knight Errant to Exploring Pioneer: The Influence of Medieval Romances on the Depiction of Human and Non-Human Others in John Filson’s “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon”

Abstract

Keywords:

Giulia Magro

Developed By