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Full Description
Before the West Was West examines the extent to which scholars have engaged in-depth with pre-1800 "western" texts and asks what we mean by "western" American literature in the first place and when that designation originated.
Calling into question the implicit temporal boundaries of the "American West" in literature, a literature often viewed as having commenced only at the beginning of the 1800s, Before the West Was West explores the concrete, meaningful connections between different texts as well as the development of national ideologies and mythologies. Examining pre-nineteenth-century writings that do not fit conceptions of the Wild West or of cowboys, cattle ranching, and the Pony Express, these thirteen essays demonstrate that no single, unified idea or geography defines the American West.
Contributors investigate texts ranging from the Norse Vinland Sagas and Mary Rowlandson's famous captivity narrative to early Spanish and French exploration narratives, an eighteenth-century English novel, and a play by Aphra Behn. Through its examination of the disparate and multifaceted body of literature that arises from a broad array of cultural backgrounds and influences, Before the West Was West apprehends the literary West in temporal as well as spatial and cultural terms and poses new questions about "westernness" and its literary representation.
Contents
Foreword by Michael P. Branch
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Reconsidering the "When" of the West
1. From Hunahpu to Hiawatha: The Passion of Corn and the Sublimation of Violence in Native American Mythmaking
Paul G. Zolbrod
2. When the East Was West: Vinland in the American Imaginary
Annette Kolodny
3. Accommodating Presence: Esteban, Fray Marcos, and the Problem of Literary Translation on the American Frontier
Cassander L. Smith
4. Captured by Genre: Mary Rowlandson's Western Imagination on the Nineteenth-Century Frontier
John David Miles
5. The Royal Frontier: Colonist and Native Relations in Aphra Behn's Virginia
Rebecca M. Lush
6. Frontier Commonwealths: Violence, Private Interest, and the Public Good in Hennepin's A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America
David J. Peterson
7. The Bad Guys Wear Tricornered Hats: The Villasur Massacre of 1720 and the Segesser II Hide Painting in Spanish and French Colonial Literature
Gordon M. Sayre
8. The Removes of Harriot Stuart: Charlotte Lennox and the Birth of the Western
Marta Kvande and Sara Spurgeon
9. Contrast and Contradiction: The Emergent West in CrÈvecoeur's Regional Theory
Tara Penry
10. The Business of Heaven and Earth: Toponymy and the Imperial Idyll in the DomÍnguez-Escalante Journal of 1776
George English Brooks
11. An Eighteenth-Century Narrative of Encounter in the Trans-Mississippi West: Jean-Baptiste Trudeau on the Missouri River
Robert Woods Sayre
12. Harmonizing the "West": Jefferson's Account of Louisiana and American Identity
Renaud Contini
Contributors
Index
