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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.

The purpose of this thesis is to consider the Canadian wilderness as an actual and a mythological site for discursive change. Part One analyses five pioneer journal/handbooks, and Part Two examines four contemporary texts which focus on the pioneer experience. Chapters One to Three explore the extent to which the disruption of their political and social assumptions caused the female pioneers to explore alternative constructions of gender. These chapters illustrate that the women do indeed see the potential in the wilderness for redefining themselves, for shifting away from the restrictive nineteenth-century construction of women. This shift comes in part from their active relationship with the landscape, and in part through their representation of the indigenous women, a representation which is at once feminist and imperialist. They image the indigenous women as being far more \"masculine\" than themselves; the language with which they describe these women reveals both their admiration for them and a characteristic nineteenth-century dismissal of them as an inferior race. Chapters Four and Five argue that, given their culturally central position, the male writers do not show the same desire for a change of identity as the women do. Their primary concern is civilizing the wilderness, and they represent themselves as being central to that civilizing process. Part Two examines four contemporary texts which focus on the nineteenth-century pioneer experience. All four of these texts foreground the constructedness of our received historical narratives and offer alternative narratives. The women writers see an important link between the lives of pioneer women and the continuing marginalization of contemporary women. They are attracted to the potential for transformation offered by the wilderness, but emphasize that that potential has been unrealized. All of the authors propose a more fragmented, less linear conception of history and identity than does traditional Western culture. The thesis concludes that the women writers in both centuries are attracted to the liberating potential of the wilderness. It also concludes that the tension between feminist and imperialist impulses exists, to some extent, in the contemporary texts as well as in the early ones.

A female character type, one which is arguably unique to Canada, can be found in English-Canadian fiction from the time of the earliest creative writing, up to and including the present time. By virtue of her historical origins, this character type should be labelled the \"pioneer woman\" since her creation was, in fact, grounded in the actuality of the pioneer experience, and on details of that experience that were reconstructed and reinterpreted in fiction, often through a moralistic or idealistic filter. In The Backwoods of Canada (1836) and The Canadian Settler's Guide (1855), Catharine Parr Traill described a pioneer woman's role on the Ontario frontier of the mid-nineteenth century, mingling fact with fancy to paint an idealized portrait of the Canadian pioneer woman. Traill's transposition of this figure into fiction, as for example, Catharine Maxwell of Canadian Crusoes (1852), resulted in her creation of what was, in effect, a new fictional character type: the pioneer woman. Various versions of the pioneer woman appear in English-Canadian fiction throughout the hundred years following Traill's development of the character type. Sara Jeannette Duncan's The Imperialist (1904) and Ralph Connor's The Man From Glengarry (1901) and Glengarry School Days (1902) feature pioneer women who cope on a real physical frontier and also cope with a new type of frontier environment, one grounded in social and personal concerns rather than in the physical landscape. The longevity of the pioneer woman as character type in fiction is further demonstrated in the fiction of Margaret Laurence. Hagar Shipley of The Stone Angel (1964), Rachel Cameron of A Jest of God (1966), and Morag Gunn of The Diviners (1974) inhabit an internal, personal frontier. Like Duncan's Advena Murchison and Connor's Mrs. Murray, they are more contemporary versions of Traill's pioneer woman. All exhibit traits which link them to Traill's original model of the pioneer; all are part of a creative continuity which extends from Traill to Laurence and beyond.

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.

The central issue Bush finds in these works is how their authors have dealt with the authority of Mormon Church leaders. As she puts it in her preface, \"I use the phrase 'faithful transgression' to describe moments in the texts when each writer, explicitly or implicitly, commits herself in writing to trust her own ideas and authority over official religious authority while also conceiving of and depicting herself to be a 'faithful' member of the Church.\" Bush recognizes her book as her own act of faithful transgression. Writing it involved wrestling, she states, \"with my own deeply ingrained religious beliefs and my equally compelling education in feminist theories that mean to liberate and empower women.\" Faithful Transgressions examines a remarkable group of authors and their highly readable and entertaining books. In producing the first significant book-length study of Mormon women's autobiographical writing, Bush rides a wave of memoir publishing and academic interest in autobiography and other life narratives. As she elucidates these works in relation to the religious tradition that played a major role in shaping them, she not only positions them in relation to feminist theory and current work on women's life writings but ties them to the long literary tradition of spiritual autobiography.

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.

Tarantino meets Deadwood in this full-throttle drama of our colonial past, written by the indomitable Leah Purcell.Henry Lawson's story of the Drover's Wife pits the stoic silhouette of a woman against the unforgiving Australian landscape, staring down a serpent--it's our frontier myth captured in a few pages.

Why do narratives of Indian captivity emerge in New England between 1682 and 1707 and why are these texts, so centrally concerned with women's experience, supported and even written by a powerful group of Puritan ministers? InThe Captive's Position, Teresa Toulouse argues for a new interpretation of the captivity narrative-one that takes into account the profound shifts in political and social authority and legitimacy that occurred in New England at the end of the seventeenth century. While North American narratives of Indian captivity had been written before this period by French priests and other European adventurers, those stories had focused largely on Catholic conversions and martyrdoms or male strategies for survival among the Indians. In contrast, the New England texts represented a colonial Protestant woman who was separated brutally from her family but who demonstrated qualities of religious acceptance, humility, and obedience until she was eventually returned to her own community. Toulouse explores how the female captive's position came to resonate so powerfully for traditional male elites in the second and third generation of the Massachusetts colony. Threatened by ongoing wars with Indians and French as well as by a range of royal English interventions in New England political and cultural life, figures such as Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, and John Williams perceived themselves to be equally challenged by religious and social conflicts within New England. By responding to and employing popular representations of female captivity, they were enabled to express their ambivalence toward the world of their fathers and toward imperial expansion and thereby to negotiate their own complicated sense of personal and cultural identity. Examining the captivity narratives of Mary Rowlandson, Hannah Dustan, Hannah Swarton, and John Williams (who comes to stand in for the female captive), Toulouse asserts the need to read these gendered texts as cultural products that variably engage, shape, and confound colonial attitudes toward both Europe and the local scene in Massachusetts. In doing so,The Captive's Positionoffers a new story of the rise and breakdown of orthodox Puritan captivities and a meditation on the relationship between dreams of authority and historical change.

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.

The Negritude movement, whose birth can be dated precisely to 1935, extremely masculine, even macho, pointedly avoided acknowledging its gestation in the Clamart salon of the Nardal sisters, who founded La Revue du monde noir. Even less the mulatresses Roger Little 12 authors from Martinique who had preceded them : Drasta Houel, poet (Les Vies legeres, 1916) and novelist (Cruautes et tendresses, 1925), and the cousins Suzanne et Renee Lacascade, authors respectively of the novels Claire-Solange, ame africaine (1924) and L'Ile qui meurt (1930). The present study takes advantage of the recent republication of these works and of the new light thrown on the cultural contributions of women to show their intrinsic interest while suggesting reasons for their neglect : they worked independently of one another and published no follow-up work. Such a lack of visibility contrasts with the concerted efforts by the founders of Negritude.