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

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910791296903321
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Lincoln, Nebraska : , : University of Nebraska Press, , 2014; ©2014
• ISBN: 0-8032-6532-8; 0-8032-6531-X
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (683 p.)
• Disciplina: 810.9/002
• Soggetti: American literature - 17th century - History and criticism; American literature - 18th century - History and criticism; Frontier and pioneer life in literature; West (U.S.) In literature
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Includes index.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: 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 Crevecoeur'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.
• Sommario/riassunto: 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 1800's, 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