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In Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West, William R. Handley examines literary interpretations of the Western American past. Handley argues that although scholarship provides a narrative of western history that counters optimistic story of frontier individualism by focusing on the victims of conquest, twentieth-century American fiction tells a different story of intra-ethnic violence surrounding marriages and families. He examines works of historiography,as well as writing by Zane Grey, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner and Joan Didion among others, to argue that these works highlight white Americans' anxiety about what happens to American 'character' when domestic enemies such as Indians and Mormon polygamists, against whom the nation had defined itself in the nineteenth century, no longer threaten its homes. Handley explains that once its enemies are gone, imperialism brings violence home in retrospective narratives that allegorise national pasts and futures through intimate relationships.

Handley examines a cluster of similar, though historically disparate, rhetorical treatments of non-normative marriage. His intention is to read those shifting and contingent meanings, and the impulse to draw lines and make sometimes vast cultural distinctions, as signs of more material disturbances that animate the need for comparatively empty and even redundant definitions, in law, of what \"marriage\" is.

In Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West, William R. Handley examines literary interpretations of the Western American past. Handley argues that although scholarship provides a narrative of western history that counters optimistic story of frontier individualism by focusing on the victims of conquest, twentieth-century American fiction tells a different story of intra-ethnic violence surrounding marriages and families. He examines works of historiography,as well as writing by Zane Grey, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner and Joan Didion among others, to argue that these works highlight white Americans' anxiety about what happens to American 'character' when domestic enemies such as Indians and Mormon polygamists, against whom the nation had defined itself in the nineteenth century, no longer threaten its homes. Handley explains that once its enemies are gone, imperialism brings violence home in retrospective narratives that allegorise national pasts and futures through intimate relationships.

Nommo is the magic power of the word to call things into being, to give life to things by the unity and grace of the spoken word. Handley discusses Toni Morrison's novel \"Beloved,\" which uses nommo to bring to life ghosts and the memories of a slave past.

Handley detects the real fictions of history in Percival Everett's 1996 novel Watershed. Part mystery, part western, Watershed is a novel in which history weighs heavily, perhaps more so than in any other of Everett's works.

\"Reading the West: New Essays on the Literature of the American West\" edited by Michael Kowalewski is reviewed.

This chapter contains sections titled: References and Further Reading