Lone Star Vistas: Travel Narratives on Texas, 1821-1861

Abstract

The monograph Lone Star Vistas analyses narrative constructions of Texas as a geographic and social space from the de-facto independence of Mexico in 1821 to the beginning of the U.S. American Civil War in 1861 in selected works of Mexican, Anglo U.S. American, and German travel writing. Its tri-national perspective provides a more complex picture than the existing scholarship on the cultural history of Texas during the time period in question and of the mechanisms of narrative constructions of ideas, places, and peoples. Examining ac-counts penned by a broad range of writers for distinct purposes and audiences, the study further charts different types of journey narratives, thereby formulating a poetics of the travel genre and rendering these texts types more readily amenable for further analysis.