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118
result(s) for
"Frontier and pioneer life in literature"
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Too Good to Be Altogether Lost
Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the well-known Little House
series, wrote stories from her childhood because they were
“too good to be altogether lost.” And those stories
seemed far from being lost during the remainder of her lifetime
and through most of the twentieth century. They were translated
into dozens of languages; generations of children read them at
school; and dedicated readers made pilgrimages to the settings of
the Little House books. With the release of NBC’s
Little House on the Prairie series in 1974, Wilder was
well on her way to becoming an international literary superstar.
Simultaneously, however, the novels themselves began to slip from
view, replaced by an onslaught of assumptions and questions about
Wilder’s values and politics and even about the
books’ authenticity. From the 1980s, a slow but steady
critical crescendo began to erode Wilder’s literary
reputation. In
Too Good to Be Altogether Lost , Wilder expert Pamela
Smith Hill dives back into the Little House books, closely
examining Wilder’s text, her characters, and their stories.
Hill reveals that these gritty, emotionally complex novels depict
a realistic coming of age for a girl in the American West. This
realism in Wilder’s novels, once perceived as a fatal flaw,
can lead to essential discussions not only about the past but
about the present—and the underlying racism young people
encounter when reading today. Hill’s fresh approach to
Wilder’s books, including surprising revelations about
Wilder’s novel
The First Four Years , shows how this author forever
changed the literary landscape of children’s and young
adult literature in ways that remain vital and relevant
today.
eBook
Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada
Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canadaengages in a discursive analysis of three 'texts' - the narratives of Anna Jameson (Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada), Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney (Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear), and the 'Janey Canuck' books of Emily Murphy - in order to examine how, in the context of a settler colony, white women have been part of the project of its governance, its racial constitution, and its role in British imperialism. Using Foucauldian theories of governmentality to connect these first-person narratives to wider strategies of race making, Jennifer Henderson develops a feminist critique of the ostensible freedom that Anglo-Protestant women found within nineteenth-century liberal projects of rule.
Henderson's interdisciplinary approach - including critical studies in law, literature, and political history - offers a new perspective on these women that detaches them from the dominant colony-to-nation narrative and shows their importance in a tradition of moral regulation. This project not only redresses problems in Canadian literary history, it also responds to the limits of postcolonial, nationalist, and feminist projects that search for authentic voices and resistant agency without sufficient attention to the layers of historical sedimentation through which these voices speak.
eBook
Exploding the Western : myths of empire on the postmodern frontier
The frontier and Western expansionism are so quintessentially a part of American history that the literature of the West and Southwest is in some senses the least regional and the most national literature of all. The frontier—the place where cultures meet and rewrite themselves upon each other’s texts—continues to energize writers whose fiction evokes, destroys, and rebuilds the myth in ways that attract popular audiences and critics alike. Sara L. Spurgeon focuses on three writers whose works not only exemplify the kind of engagement with the theme of the frontier that modern authors make, but also show the range of cultural voices that are present in Southwestern literature: Cormac McCarthy, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ana Castillo. Her central purposes are to consider how the differing versions of the Western “mythic” tales are being recast in a globalized world and to examine the ways in which they challenge and accommodate increasingly fluid and even dangerous racial, cultural, and international borders. In Spurgeon’s analysis, the spaces in which the works of these three writers collide offer some sharply differentiated visions but also create new and unsuspected forms, providing the most startling insights. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes tragic, the new myths are the expressions of the larger culture from which they spring, both a projection onto a troubled and troubling past and an insistent, prophetic vision of a shared future.
eBook
Writing the Trail
For a long time, the American West was mainly identified with white masculinity, but as more women’s narratives of westward expansion came to light, scholars revised purely patriarchal interpretations. Writing the Trail continues in this vein by providing a comparative literary analysis of five frontier narratives---Susan Magoffin’s Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico, Sarah Royce’s A Frontier Lady, Louise Clappe’s The Shirley Letters, Eliza Farnham’s California, In-doors and Out, and Lydia Spencer Lane’s I Married a Soldier---to explore the ways in which women’s responses to the western environment differed from men’s.Throughout their very different journeys---from an eighteen-year-old bride and self-styled “wandering princess\" on the Santa Fe Trail, to the mining camps of northern California, to garrison life in the Southwest---these women moved out of their traditional positions as objects of masculine culture. Initially disoriented, they soon began the complex process of assimilating to a new environment, changing views of power and authority, and making homes in wilderness conditions.Because critics tend to consider nineteenth-century women’s writings as confirmations of home and stability, they overlook aspects of women’s textualizations of themselves that are dynamic and contingent on movement through space. As the narratives in Writing the Trail illustrate, women’s frontier writings depict geographical, spiritual, and psychological movement. By tracing the journeys of Magoffin, Royce, Clappe, Farnham, and Lane, readers are exposed to the subversive strength of travel writing and come to a new understanding of gender roles on the nineteenth-century frontier.
eBook
Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West
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.
eBook