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Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) was born near Lake Mills, Iowa, and grew up in Saskatchewan, Canada; Great Falls, Montana; and Salt Lake City. He spent nearly twenty years in Salt Lake, from 1921 to 1937, and attended East High School and the University of Utah. He later taught at the University of Wisconsin, Harvard, and Stanford.
As he was later to say in his essay 'At Home in the Fields of the Lord,' he eventually realized that, if he had to have a hometown, it was Salt Lake City. He came to use the 'City of the Saints' for settings in three novels: The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Recapitulation, and The Preacher and the Slave (later retitled Joe Hill). His years in Utah helped develop the environmental ethic he espoused so eloquently in his famous 'Wilderness Letter.'
Robert Steensma has meticulously searched through archival photographs, quotations from Stegner’s writings, and interpretive essays in order to recreate the Salt Lake City of the 1920s and 1930s, the city of Stegner’s youth and young adulthood. This is a book that will appeal to all who have been moved by Stegner’s novels, nonfiction, or his urgent appeals for conservation.

Beginning in 1849, Alfred Doten recorded his life in minute detail for more than 54 years. His revealing daily accounts of the West's lusty mining frontier included tales of lynching, vigilante justice, shootings in the street, grand opera and theatre, stock manipulations, seances, musical soirees, and general "jollifications." Clark selected and edited the most valuable portions of Doten's massive diaries. He said he knew of no other account, fact or fiction, that so graphically presented the tragic course of a single representative life through the violent transformations brought about by the California Gold Rush and the Nevada Silver Boom.

Ah, the Wild West! Wide open plains, beautiful sunsets, and thundering herds. Days when the cowboy was king, and good guys always wore white. The love affair with the American West has stood the test of time and survived competition from sports, electronic gadgets, and reality.

Wanted Dead or Alive presents the first-ever comprehensive look at how the American West has been depicted in popular culture. Following Richard Aquila's introduction, which examines the birth and growth of the pop culture West in the context of American history, noted experts explore developments in popular Western fiction, major forms of live Western entertainment, trends in Western movies and television shows, images of the West in popular music, and visual images of the West in popular art and advertising. For the reader on the trail of even more information, each section of the book concludes with suggestions for further reading.
 

 

Expanding the scope of American borderland and frontier literary scholarship, West of the Border examines the writings of nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century Native, African, Asian, and Anglo American frontier writers. This book views frontiers as “human spaces” where cultures make contact as it considers multicultural frontier writers who speak from “west of the border.”

James P. Beckwourth, a half-black fur trader; Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, a Paiute translator; Salishan author Mourning Dove; Cherokee novelist John Rollin Ridge; Sui Sin Far, an Anglo-Chinese short story writer, and her sister, romance novelist Onoto Watanna; and Mary Austin, a white southwestern writer- each of these intercultural writers faces a rite of passage into a new social order. Their writings negotiate their various frontier ordeals: the encroachment of pioneers on the land; reservation life; assimilation; Christianity; battles over territories and resources; exclusion; miscegenation laws; and the devastation of the environment.

In West of the Border, Noreen Groover Lape raises issues inherent in American pluralism today by broaching timely concerns about American frontier politics, conceptualizing frontiers as intercultural contact zones, and expanding the boundaries of frontier literary studies by giving voice to minority writers.

A history of the Western in fiction and on film that shows how it reflects the changing obsessions and fears of American culture

Few genres are so closely identified with America as the Western. In this wide-ranging examination of the Western and its appeal, Lee Clark Mitchell ranges from the novels of James Fenimore Cooper to Louis L'Amour, and from classic films like Stagecoach to spaghetti Westerns like A Fistful of Dollar to show how Westerns helped assuage a series of crises in American culture. This landmark book shows that the Western owes its perennial appeal not to unchanging conventions but to the deftness with which it responds to the obsessions and fears of its audience. And no obsession, Lee Mitchell argues, has figured more prominently in the Western than what it means to be a man. 

In Whitman East and West, fifteen prominent scholars track the surprising ways in which Whitman's poetry and prose continue to be meaningful at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Covering a broad range of issues—from ecology to children's literature, gay identity to China's May 4th Movement, nineteenth-century New York politics to the emerging field of normality studies, Mao Zedong to American film—each original essay opens a previously unexplored field of study, and each yields new insights by demonstrating how emerging methodologies and approaches intersect with and illuminate Whitman's ideas about democracy, sexuality, America, and the importance of literature.

Confirming the growing international spirit of American studies, the essays in Whitman East and West developed out of a landmark conference in Beijing, the first major conference in China to focus on an American poet. Scholars from Asia, Europe, and North America set out to track the ways in which Whitman's poetry has become part of China's cultural landscape as well as the literary landscapes of other countries. By describing his assimilation into other cultures and his resulting transformation into a hybrid poet, these essayists celebrate Whitman's multiple manifestations in other languages and contexts.

For centuries, India has captured our imagination. Far more than a mere geographical presence, India is also an imaginative construct shaped by competing cultures, emotions, and ideologies. In Whose India? Teresa Hubel examines literary and historical texts by the British and Indian writers who gave meaning to the construct “India” during the final decades of the Empire. Feminist and postcolonial in its approach, this work describes the contest between British imperialists and Indian nationalists at that historical moment when India sought to achieve its independence; that is, when the definition, acquisition, and ownership of India was most vehemently at stake.
Hubel collapses the boundary between literature and history by emphasizing the selected nature of the “facts” that comprise historical texts, and by demonstrating the historicity of fiction. In analyzing the orthodox construction of the British/Indian encounter, Hubel calls into question assumptions about the end of nationalism implicit in mainstream histories and fiction, which generally describe a battleground on which only ruling-class Indians and British meet. Marginalized texts by women, untouchables, and overt imperialists alike are, therefore, examined alongside the well-known work of figures such as Rudyard Kipling, Jawaharlal Nehru, E. M. Forster, and Mahatma Gandhi.
In Whose India? discursive ownership and resistance to ownership are mutually constructing categories. As a result, the account of Indian nationalism and British imperialism that emerges is much more complicated, multivocal, and even more contradictory than previous studies have imagined. Of interest to students and scholars engaged in literary, historical, colonial/postcolonial, subaltern, and Indian studies, Whose India? will also attract readers concerned with gender issues and the canonization of texts.

William Styron - American Writers 98 was first published in 1971. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In this innovative work, Danny L. Miller surveys some of the depictions of mountain women from the 1880s to the 1950s, in the writings of Mary Noailles Murfree, Edith Summers Kelley, Anne W. Armstrong, Emma Bell Miles, Jesse Stuart, James Still, and Harriette Arnow. The major aims of the study are to show changes in the descriptions of mountain women—from non-native to native portrayals; from romantic to realistic presentations; and from an emphasis on victimization and drudgery to an emphasis on strength and endurance. Miller identifies qualities that have consistently characterized mountain women in literature.

This book grows out of the question, "At this particular moment of tense geopolitics and inter-linked economies, what insights can South Asian American writing offer us about living in the world?"

South Asian American literature, with its focus on the multiple geographies and histories of the global dispersal of South Asians, pulls back from a close-up view of the United States to reveal a wider landscape of many nations and peoples.

South Asian American poets, novelists, and playwrights depict the nation as simultaneously discrete and entwined with the urgencies of places as diverse as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, Burma, Pakistan, and Trinidad. Drawing on the cosmopolitan sensibility of scholars like Anthony Appiah, Vinay Dharwadker, Martha Nussbaum, Bruce Robbins, and Amartya Sen, this book exhorts North American residents to envision connectedness with inhabitants of other lands. The world out there arrives next door.

A diverse group of writers and scholars follow the lead of noted folklorist Barre Toelken and consider, from the inside, the ways in which varied cultures in the American West understand and express their relations to the world around them. As Barre Toelken puts it in The Dynamics of Folklore, "'Worldview' refers to the manner in which a culture sees and expresses its relation to the world around it." In Worldviews and the American West, seventeen notable authors and scholars, employing diverse approaches and styles, apply Toelken's ideas about worldview to the American West. While the contributors represent a range of voices, methods, and visions, they are integrated through their focus on the theme of worldview in one region. Worldviews and the American West includes essays by Margaret K. Brady, Hal Cannon, Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer, James S. Griffith, Barry Lopez, Robert McCarl, Elliott Oring, Twilo Scofield, Steve Siporin, Kim Stafford, C. W. Sullivan III, Jeannie B. Thomas, George Venn, George B. Wasson, and William A. Wilson. Each of the authors in this collection attempts to get inside one or more of the worldviews of the many cultures that have come to share and interpret the American West. The result is a lively mix of styles and voices as the authors' own worldviews interact with the multiple perspectives of the diverse peoples (and, in Barry Lopez's "The Language of Animals," other species) of the West. This diversity matches the geography of the region they all call home and gives varied life and meaning to its physical and cultural landscape.

Woven Shades of Green is an annotated selection of literature by authors who focus on the natural world and the beauty of Ireland. It begins with the Irish monks and their largely anonymous nature poetry, written at a time when Ireland was heavily forested. A section follows devoted to the changing Irish landscape, through both deforestation and famine, including the nature poetry of William Allingham, and James Clarence Mangan, essays from Thomas Gainford and William Thackerary, and novel excerpts from William Carleton and Emily Lawless. The anthology then turns to the nature literature of the Irish Literary Revival, including Yeats and Synge, and an excerpt from George Moore’s novel The Lake. Part four shifts to modern Irish nature poetry, beginning with Patrick Kavanaugh, and continuing with the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and others. Finally, the anthology concludes with a section on various Irish naturalist writers, and the unique prose and philosophical nature writing of John Moriarty, followed by a comprehensive list of environmental organizations in Ireland, which seek to preserve the natural beauty of this unique country.    

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Much has been made of the image of writers in Paris—romanticized and idealized in fiction and on screen, these émigré artists in sidewalk cafés spark our imagination with unusual force. But rarely do the real-life figures speak to us directly to comment on their work, their lives, and their reasons for choosing to live and work in Paris.

In these striking interviews, E. M. Cioran, Julio Cortázar, Brion Gysin, Eugène Ionesco, Carlos Fuentes, Jean-Claude Carrière, Milan Kundera, Nathalie Sarraute, and Edmund Jabès do just this as they speak out on the risks they've taken, on their struggles and discoveries, on tradition, challenge, and their near-unanimous status as émigrés. A consummate interviewer, Jason Weiss spoke in depth with these pathbreaking artists regarding their lives, their craft, and their very special relationship to Paris. Their writings were naturally the main focus of investigation, but Weiss' concern was always to build on previous interviews, to deepen certain lines of inquiry and open new ones, to contribute fresh material to the ongoing record. The result is a series of invigorating, detailed portraits that go beyond personality, habits, and pleasures to examine some of the causes and effects in the unique relationship of place and temperament.

Writing at Risk suggests that there is more than we suspect binding writers of such disparate cultures and genres…perhaps their attitudes toward writing, perhaps their common attraction to risk. Readers will relish the immediacy of these interviews and will want to (re)discover the work of these exceptional artists.

Wallace Shawn usually appears in our mind's eye as the consummate eccentric actor: the shy literature teacher in Clueless; the diabolically rational villain in The Princess Bride; or as the eponymous protagonist of Vanya on 42nd Street. Few of us realize, however, that Shawn is also one of today's most provocative and political playwrights.

Writing Wrongs: The Work of Wallace Shawn is a close and personal look into the life and literary work of the man whom Joseph Papp called "a dangerous writer." As the son of the late William Shawn, renowned editor of The New Yorker, Wallace Shawn was born into privilege and trained to thoroughly liberal values, but his plays relentlessly question the liberal faith in individualism and common decency. In an uncompromising way that is all his own, Shawn registers the shock of the new.

In works such as Aunt Dan and Lemon, My Dinner with Andre, and The Designated Mourner, he wrenches out of place all of the usual, comfortable mechanisms by which we operate as audiences. Perhaps our discomfort and struggle to understand a play might provoke some change in the way we see ourselves and behave in relation to others -- but Shawn offers little in the way of solace.

W.D. King's incisive critiques of the plays and inquiry into the life and times of their author develop a portrait of Shawn as a major figure in contemporary theater.