Title Before the West was West : critical essays on pre-1800 literature of the American frontiers / edited and with an introduction by Amy T. Hamilton and Tom J. Hillard ; foreword by Michael P. Branch

Published Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 2014

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Description 1 online resource Contents From Hunahpu to Hiawatha : the passion of corn and the sublimation of violence in native American mythmaking / Paul G. Zolbrod -- When the East was West : Vinland in the American imaginary / Annette Kolodny -- Accommodating presence : Esteban, Fray Marcos, and the problem of literary translation on the American frontier / Cassander L. Smith -- Captured by genre : Mary Rowlandson's Western imagination on the nineteenth-century frontier / John David Miles -- The royal frontier : colonist and native relations in Aphra Behn's Virginia / Rebecca M. Lush -- Frontier commonwealths : violence, private interest, and the public good in Hennepin's A new discovery of a vast country in America / David J. Peterson -- 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 -- The removes of Harriot Stuart : Charlotte Lennox and the birth of the western / Marta Kvande and Sara Spurgeon -- Contrast and contradiction : the emergent West in Crèvecoeur's regional theory / Tara Penry -- The business of heaven and earth : toponymy and the imperial idyll in the Domínguez-Escalante journal of 1776 / George English Brooks -- An eighteenth-century narrative of encounter in the Trans-Mississippi West : Jean-Baptiste Trudeau on the Missouri river / Robert Woods Sayre -- Harmonizing the "West": Jefferson's account of Louisiana and American identity / Renaud Contini Summary 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 Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes English Print version record Subject American literature -- 17th century -- History and criticism American literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism Frontier and pioneer life in literature. LITERARY CRITICISM -- American -- General. American literature Frontier and pioneer life in literature Literature SUBJECT West (U.S.) -- In literature Subject West United States Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. Form Electronic book Author Hamilton, Amy T., editor Hillard, Tom J., editor ISBN 9780803265318 080326531X

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