Choice 评论
Focused by necessity on the ambiguous legacy of Frederick Turner's frontier thesis and deliberately crossing borders between literary criticism and historiography, this book makes a major contribution to the literature on western American cultural studies. Handley (Univ. of Southern California) deals with literature composed at the end of the frontier era and after, when circumstances of western literary marriages often mirrored social conditions in the American nation. Owen Wister, for example, concluded The Virginian with labored explanations of how conventional marriage could accommodate frontier violence. Handley interprets Zane Grey's anti-Mormonism in Riders of the Purple Sage as a demonizing of polygamy for nationalistic purposes, Willa Cather's novels as assertions of western independence from expected heterosexual unions, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as a work that deliberately questions its characters' "western" identities, and Joan Didion's and Wallace Stegner's novels of problematical marriages (especially Stegner's Angle of Repose) as profound rejections of romanticized versions of western myth. Like The New Western History: The Territory Ahead, ed. by Forrest Robinson (1998), Handley's book incorporates significant insights into the methodologies of historians and literary critics in order to bridge the gap between reality and representation. Includes illustrations and notes. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above. J. J. Wydeven Bellevue University