Item Detail
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13338
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0
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0
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English
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The Literary Landscape of the Trans-Mississippi West : 1826-1902
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Champaign County, Illinois
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University of Illinois
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Ph.D. diss.
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"Far western fiction of the nineteenth century is one of the greatest disappointments and, for some, embarrassments of American literature. When analyzing or tracing the development of our actual and mythic Wests, most scholars prefer to study the supposed non-fiction accounts of explorers, naturalists, geologists, traders, soldiers, and historians while ignoring the novels or romances of writers like Charles Wilkms Webber, A. W. Arrington, Jeremiah Clemens, or Emerson Bennett. Unfortunately many students of the West thus lose sight of the fact that the discoveries and conclusions of scientist, philosopher, and historian are often revealed to a nation and its artists not by the original stateents but through the medium of fiction, particularly that of popular fiction. Even those who do recognize the role played by imaginative literature in the development of our image of the West tend to avoid all but the dime novelists of the nineteenth century. In so doing they perhaps unconsciously create their own myth of a great desert or one hundred year vacuum in western fiction, and sustain the rejected but still expressed critical position that both western fiction and western myth somehow sprang full formed from the forehead of Owen Wister. Without denying the inferiority of most far western fiction or the superior interest of corresponding non-fiction, this study attempts to treat at least part of the imaginative literature as a tradition which during the nineteenth century developed its own conventions which, in turn, determined its shape and vision." [Preface]