Plotting the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail

by Stephen Fender

• ISBN13: 9780521135719
• ISBN10: 0521135710
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-02-25
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book focuses on the experience of the Californian Gold Rush of 1849-1850, not in terms of what happened (a subject much covered by historians) but in terms of how people of various levels of sophistication wrote about it. Drawing on a variety of sources - diaries, journals, letters, and contemporary journalism - Dr Fender explores how both amateur and professional writers attempted to come to terms with the physical wilderness of the transcontinental landscape and the social wilderness of early California. Dr Fender has produced an intriguing and highly readable book, which should prove fascinating not only to a wide range of students in the field of American studies but also to non-specialists who are interested in nineteenth-century American literary and cultural history.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

The West and the man of letters: confidence and anxiety

Fremont and the humble bee

The forty-niners: the stylistic pathology of the Overland Trail

The unofficial Gold Rush

The journalists' California

Mark Twain's West: the stillbirth of satire

The perennial critique and the poem of fact

Notes to the text

List of primary sources treated at length

An essay on further reading

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.