Recalling the Wild: Naturalism and the Closing of the American West
Editorial Reviews Perry Meisel, New York University "...an extraordinary bold and original contribution to the study of nineteenth-century American literature and culture... " From the Back Cover Ever since the first interactions between Europeans and Native Americans, the "West" has served as a site of complex geographical, social, and cultural transformation. American literature is defined, in part, by the central symbols derived from these points of contact. At the end of the nineteenth century, Western frontier was declared "closed," a demise solidified by Frederick Jackson Turner's influential essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893). At the same time, "naturalism" was popularized in the writings of Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Willa Cather, and the photographs of Edward Curtis. Though very different artists, they shared a common attraction of the mythic American West.
Mary Lawlor traces the cultural conception of the American West through its incarnations in the "westernism" of Daniel Boone and James Fenimore Cooper and the romanticism of the expansive frontier they helped to formulate. Simultaneously, however, the influence of evolutionism and the styles of French naturalism began to challenge this romantic idiom. This naturalistic discourse constructed the West as a strictly material place, a limited, and often limiting, geography that saw regional identity as the product of material "forces" rather than of individualistic enterprise.
Lawlor explains how literary and artistic devices helped shaped the idea of the American West and the changing landscape of the continent at the turn of the nineteenth century. Recalling the Wild: Naturalism and the Closing of the American West
Recalling the Wild: Naturalism and the Closing of the American West,Mary Lawlor,Rutgers University Press,0813528305,19th century,20th century,American - General,American fiction,History and criticism,In literature,Literary Criticism,Literature - Classics / Criticism,West (U.S.)
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