Romantics

Abstract

Frontiers, by their very nature of being unexplored and unknown, are lands ruled by the imagination. As Richard Slotkin has pointed out, as late as the end of the nineteenth century, the American West itself was still “a space defined less by maps and surveys than by myths and illusions, projective fantasies, wild anticipations, extravagant expectations.” How then could that much more distant frontier to the west be anything but a world of dreams and illusions? Indeed, only the existence of such fantasies regarding the Pacific and Asia can help us explain the touristy mood that enveloped Americans even as they made the trek across the ocean as soldiers bound for war.¹