Desert, Garden, Margin, Range

The mystique surrounding the volatile American frontier has left an indelible mark on our national consciousness. Basic features of the American self-image--such as rugged individualism, unlimited potential for growth, radical democracy, and six-gun law and order--grew out of the westward movement, and still shape our culture today, one hundred years after Frederick Jackson Turner and the Census Bureau proclaimed the frontier "closed." Whether viewed as a wasteland or a. Paradise, the narrow edge of civilization or a vast spread of open territory, the frontier has never failed to fire our imaginations and fuel our endeavors. The best American writers have always built upon and simultaneously questioned this intimate relationship. In Desert, Garden, Margin, Range ten essays examine the wide variety of ways in which literature has explored the frontier. The first five selections discuss traditionally canonical works by writers such as. Cooper and Hawthorne, while the second half of the book concentrates on marginalized texts by Chicano, Native American, Canadian, and women writers. The introduction by editor Eric Heyne discusses how our understanding of the frontier and its role in literature has changed in the last twenty years. The unitary myth of brave frontiersmen, hardy European settlers, and doomed, benighted natives disguises a rich assortment of individual experiences, many running directly. Counter to the "official version" as shaped by the novels of Cooper, the "biographies" of Daniel Boone, and the entire genre of the Western. In this period of renewed historical interest and insight, Desert, Garden, Margin, Range offers a fresh look at one of the most important elements of the American mythos.