Frederick Jackson Turner famously declared the United States frontier closed in 1893, but of course he was wrong: you can’t close an idea. As many historians, literary scholars, and cultural critics since Turner have suggested, the frontier is not a place in time but a grand mythology, a story of national formation in which violent conflict gives way to white patriarchal authority and the domestication of “wild” spaces and people. Rehearsed in every form of art and popular culture, frontier mythology is also a broken promise, since the moral order, homogeneous social accord, and economic prosperity it ascribes to white settlement never arrived. As such, it prompts Americans’ continuous engagement; we return to it again and again, either to reinvest in its premises or, more productively, to reevaluate and challenge them. Though they differ in the depths of their investigations, the books under review join the ongoing project of tracking...
Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City: Re-creating the Frontier West
Fictions of Western American Domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850–1950
Failed Frontiersmen: White Men and Myth in the Post-Sixties American Historical Romance
Janet Dean is professor and chair of English and cultural studies at Bryant University, where she writes and teaches about Native American literature, nineteenth-century women writers, and the cultures of political and social protest in the United States. She is the author of Unconventional Politics: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers and U.S. Indian Policy (2016), as well as essays, chapters, and reviews in a number of journals and collections. Her current work explores the significance of material culture in Native American literature.
Janet Dean; Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City: Re-creating the Frontier West
Fictions of Western American Domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850–1950
Failed Frontiersmen: White Men and Myth in the Post-Sixties American Historical Romance. American Literature 1 September 2021; 93 (3): 533–536. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9361349
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