Jawad El Annabi – The Other Frontier: American Literary Encounters with the Mediterranean
Defense Date: October 3rd, 2025
Abstract:
This dissertation explores how a set of American literary giants from the nineteenth to the late twentieth century engage with the Mediterranean through travel writing and what can be called an evolving pattern of literary exploration that implicitly, partially shapes American identity. Through analyzing the works of Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, John Dos Passos, Paul Theroux, and through careful consideration of early Barbary captivity narrative, this study highlights both the unique and overlapping ways these authors construct the Mediterranean in their travelogues, and how by doing so they each idiosyncratically unveil a tension between their American-ness and the historically and culturally layered Mediterranean. The time and circumstances of each author’s visit and their conscious narrative choices play an important role in how Americans perceive this space. They also mirror how American thought has been affected by this literary exploration of the outside world. I approach issue from a historical and literary perspective.
