Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West

by William R. Handley

• ISBN13: 9780521816670
• ISBN10: 052181667X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-09-02
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

In Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West, William R. Handley examines literary interpretations of the Western American past. Handley argues that although scholarship provides a narrative of western history that counters optimistic story of frontier individualism by focusing on the victims of conquest, twentieth-century American fiction tells a different story of intra-ethnic violence surrounding marriages and families. He examines works of historiography,as well as writing by Zane Grey, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner and Joan Didion among others, to argue that these works highlight white Americans' anxiety about what happens to American 'character' when domestic enemies such as Indians and Mormon polygamists, against whom the nation had defined itself in the nineteenth century, no longer threaten its homes. Handley explains that once its enemies are gone, imperialism brings violence home in retrospective narratives that allegorise national pasts and futures through intimate relationships.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	viii
Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(9)
Western unions	10	(33)
Turner's rhetorical frontier	43	(24)
Marrying for race and nation: Wister's omniscience and omissions	67	(30)
Polygamy and empire: Grey's distinctions	97	(28)
Unwedded West: Cather's divides	125	(34)
Accident and destiny: Fitzgerald's fantastic geography	159	(32)
Promises and betrayals: Joan Didion and Wallace Stegner	191	(33)
Afterword	224	(10)
Notes	234	(22)
Index	256