Location and Landscape in Literary Americanisms: H. L. Davis and F. Scott Fitzgerald

Well into the twentieth century, western American literature was still dismissed as regional or was boxed in by the genre expectations of pulp Westerns. This chapter focuses less on the causes of an eastern dismissal of western literature and more on what is unique about western literature, including how it reflects the larger western experience. Sumner looks at the particular Americanisms evident in the letters of the American West, using two short stories to make his argument: H. L. Davis’s Open Winter and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Babylon Revisited

Review of The Face of the Earth

Review of SueEllen Campbell, et al. The Face of the Earth: Natural Landscapes, Science, and Culture. Published review is at Western American Literature

Violating the feminine land, body, and spirit in Western American literature

The literature of the American West, much like the history of this region, is replete with images and stories of violence. Although pop culture (i.e. popular Westerns, film, television, etc.) has inculcated the idea that the West is synonymous with violence, the origins of this supposition begins with the arrival of Europeans to the New World, which, at the point of discovery, signified the West. European conquerors and colonists brought with them, along with their hopes and dreams for a fresh start on the new continent, the Judeo-Christian cultural values and traditions of the old continent. This ideological position condoned violent interaction with and subjugation of the wilderness that lay before them, which Europeans invariably gendered female. As commercial, political, and religious interests moved the frontier westward across the continent, from the Atlantic seaboard, beyond the Great Plains, over the Rocky Mountains, and to the Pacific Coast, a wake of broken, tamed, and violated feminine bodies followed. The works of Frank Norris, Sarah Winnemucca (Northern Paiute), and Terry Tempest Williams detail and examine the means, motivations, and implications of violence on the feminine-gendered land and in the lives of women. As Norris, Winnemucca, and Williams demonstrate, violence committed against the feminine does not have simply regional ramifications but cultural and global consequences as well

Wallace Stegner\u27s Wolf Willow and 1960s Critical Essays: Renarrativizing Western American Literature for the West and for America

As writer, essayist, environmentalist, and westerner, Wallace Earle Stegner (1909-1993) confronted what he understood to be an imagined and literal American West constructed by myths of frontier conquest, pioneer settlement in and transformation of the western landscape, and cowboy exceptionalism that erased an historical legacy of hardship, failure, and destruction of land and people, and also a West constructed by Eastern publishers and literary critics who diminished western American literature to local color writing. In Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier (1962), Stegner uses fiction, history, and memoir to engage the mythic West\u27s silencing of his family\u27s failed homesteading experiences in a specific western place and the relationship of his childhood and adult selves to this place, to its history, to experiences there, and to the cultural myths that characterize his western past and present and position the West as a symbolic container of hope, opportunity, and reward for the individual and America. In an historicized western place and from childhood experiences, Stegner locates an Other western narrative and an authentic western voice that disrupts the monomythic voice and values that are out of touch not only with a modern, multicultural, urban West but also with a rural West. Coming after Wolf Willow, a series of essays-- Born a Square (1964), On the Writing of History (1965), and History, Myth, and the Western Writer (1967), reprinted in the popular The Sound of Mountain Water (1969)-- present Stegner\u27s new theory of western American literature that re-visions the West\u27s literary heritage and reclaims the western story, what he called another kind of western story-telling that engages both the present and the past Wests, acknowledges past crimes against racial others and against western lands, promotes a sense of hope for a native western art, and raises America\u27s consciousness of the personal, environmental, and cultural costs of adhering to the metanarratives of the culturally dominant mythic West of formula fiction, Hollywood films, and television series of the 1940s through 1960s. While Stegner scholars have examined the essays independently and deem them important to Stegner\u27s works and to the trajectory of western American literature in the 1970s forward, no study has undertaken an extended analysis of these three essays in relation to Wolf Willow to argue, as this dissertation does, that Wolf Willow contains in germinal form the foundation of Stegner\u27s realist, place-based, and historicist theoretical construct for western American literature he advocated for in the 1960\u27s essays

The Bozeman Trail

"The authors and the publisher should be congratulated upon this beautiful and valuable addition to Western American literature.

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationInfluenced by the continued growth of the interdisciplinary field of sound studies, my dissertation examines sounds and soundscapes in several prose works of Western American literature. Literary Soundscapes of the American West examines literary sounds-the collective, but varied, representations of sound, silence, and voice in literature-that represent intimate, affective, and always-changing relationships between people and places in the contemporary American West. I argue that Sherman Alexie, Cormac McCarthy, Terry Tempest Williams, and Charles Bowden use literary sounds to encourage-and potentially activate-what I call an audile mode of attention, which underscores sound as fundamental to people's understanding of place as well as their relationship to space generally. My analysis examines literary sounds that resonate in representations of specific Western locales: a Northwestern metropolis, the Southwestern redrock desert, and the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. Literary sounds do not operate identically in each of my primary texts. In fiction, such as Alexie's Indian Killer and McCarthy's The Crossing, representations of sound occupy an understated and subordinate position in the text. In contrast to these fictional works, Williams' Red and Bowden's Murder City demand that readers attend to sound because it represents local knowledge about pressing ethical concerns. In my analysis of contemporary Western literature, I employ critical regionalism, sound studies, and affect theory and argue that Alexie, McCarthy, Williams, and Bowden produce literary sounds that represent the tensions between various spatial scales (the personal, the local, the regional, and the global) in twentieth- and twenty-first century Western places. By combining the overlapping concerns of these three critical paradigms with my interest in representations of place in contemporary Western American literature, my dissertation evaluates the productive potential of excess in a selected body of literature. The particular excess that I consider here is made up of a relatively immaterial and transient form, sound and, to be more specific, sounds produced in literature. To say that sound, in everyday life or in literature, constitutes excess is not to suggest that it is not necessary to or always already resonant in our interpretations of and experiences with place and space. Rather, I argue that sounds produce excess by activating untapped potential and calling upon readers and listeners to identify in place those contingent truths and realities that escape our notice when we view place as a closed and contained form

“Great Nature, Refuge of the Weary Heart:” A Regional and Literary Exploration of the Early Grove Plays of the Bohemian Club

In 1872, a group of San Francisco newspapermen came together to start their own men’s club. This group, which named itself the Bohemian Club, was an outgrowth and a representative of the rapid development of the city of San Francisco at that time. Shortly after its founding, the club began making an annual retreat to the redwood forests north of the city. Eventually, the club began producing elaborate performances of musical dramas, referred to as Grove Plays, written and performed exclusively for club members at these summer retreats. This thesis, which takes its name from a line in one of these plays, makes connections between the regions of San Francisco and the American West, and the early development of the Bohemian Club and its Grove Plays, through an archetypal analysis of the first Grove Plays within the context of Western American literature as established by William Everson. The ultimate purpose of this work is to provide an argument that the early Grove Plays of the Bohemian Club are an important and overlooked part of Western American and Californian theatre history

George Wharton James

The teenager mouthing poems before a mirror in an English industrial town would go on to enthrall overflow audiences at the San Diego Exposition of 1916. Away from the podium, he would earn large reputations as an anthropologist, explorer, social reformer, and booster of his adopted land. Along the way, he picked up some smudges: accusations of lying, of questionable tactics in selfpromotion, and of heinous sexual acts. Above all, he would write, producing much curious froth, such as The Story of Captain: The Horse with the Human Brain. The title alone shows how far George Wharton James would swing off into fantasyland. But on the other end of the spectrum, The Wonders of the Colorado Desert and several other volumes enriched the nascent tradition of Western American literature. Perhaps more importantly, James’s observations on other writers of his region, though not always accurate according to today’s critical lights, would lend shape to that emerging tradition and help it thrive. But first, he would have to cross an ocean and then a continent

We Who Work the West: Class, Labor, and Space in Western American Literature, 1885-1992

Thesis advisor: Carlo RotellaThesis advisor: Christopher WilsonThis dissertation studies representations of class, labor, and space in Western American literature from 1885-1992. I argue that class is a function of labor in space and that, by zooming in on literary accounts of individuals living out this equation, we can gain a more diverse, more pluralistic vision of a developing Western and more broadly American identity. Moreover, I argue that examining the effects of working practices, class limits and mobility, and spatial shifts on characters in Western literature unveils the crucial roles loss and uncertainty played in shaping the tone, metaphors, and episodes of Western American literature. With a foothold in the political and socioeconomic concerns of this project, I catalogue and close read the less tangible or measurable components of this literature to render individual lives legible against backgrounds of shared histories. Reading those common literary tropes alongside one another suggests that, ultimately, this shared history is an American one that draws from a number of historical moments and has deep roots and routes in the West itself. Chapter One argues that Frank Norris’ McTeague depicts class and socioeconomic identity as products of the kinds of labor that evolve in the ecological and social spaces of San Francisco at the turn of the 20th century. Chapter Two explores class dispossession, masked as ethnic dispossession, in Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don and argues that national affiliations that grant capital security hold more sway in late 19th century Chicano-Californio ranching society than do claims of cultural belonging. Chapter Three focuses on literature that grew out of the twinned national crises of the 1930s, the Depression and the Dust Bowl, and argues that Sanora Babb’s Whose Names Are Unknown, John Fante’s Wait Until Spring, Bandini and Ask the Dust, and Frank Waters’ Below Grass Roots each document the instability, vulnerability, frustration, and constriction that these watershed historical moments brought to individuals and families. Chapter Four close reads historical accounts of cowboy work alongside depictions of ranching work in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Elmer Kelton’s The Time it Never Rained, and Larry McMurtry’s Horseman, Pass By. Finally, Chapter Five looks at a handful of American Indian novels that interrogate the role of labor, class, and space in post-indigenous reservation life in the American West. Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit is the central novel of this chapter, while Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and Stephen Graham Jones’ The Bird is Gone provide supplementary texts.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: English