Virgin land : the American West as symbol and myth

Book

Virgin land : the American West as symbol and myth / Henry Nash Smith.

Summary:

The spell that the West has always exercised on the American people had its most intense impact on American literature and thought during the nineteenth century. Henry Nash Smith shows, with vast comprehension, the influence of the nineteenth-century West in all its variety and strength, in special relation to social, economic, cultural, and political forces. He traces the myths and symbols of the Westward movement such as the general notion of a Westward- moving Course of Empire, the Wild Western hero, the virtuous yeoman- farmer--in such varied nineteenth- century writings as Leaves of Grass, the great corpus of Dime Novels, and most notably, Frederick Jackson Turner?s The Frontier in American History. Moreover, he synthesizes the imaginative expression of Western myths and symbols in literature with their role in contemporary politics, economics, and society, embodied in such forms as the idea of Manifest Destiny, the conflict in the American mind between idealizations of primitivism on the one hand and of progress and civilization on the other, the Homestead Act of 1862, and public-land policy after the Civil War. The myths of the American West that found their expression in nineteenth- century words and deeds remain a part of every American?s heritage, and Smith, with his insight into their power and significance, makes possible a critical appreciation of that heritage.

Record details

ISBN: 0674939557
ISBN: 9780674939523
ISBN: 0674939522
ISBN: 0674939557
ISBN: 9780674939554
Physical Description: xviii, 305 pages, [8] pages of plates : illustrations ; 21 cm
Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1970, �1950.

Content descriptions

General Note:: "Reissued with a new preface, 1970."
Bibliography, etc. Note:: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Formatted Contents Note:: Prologue: Eighteenth-century origins -- Book One: Passage to India -- A highway to the Pacific: Thomas Jefferson and the far West -- Passage to India: Thomas Hart Benton and Asa Whitney -- The untransacted destiny: William Gilpin -- Walt Whitman and Manifest Destiny -- Book Two: The sons of Leatherstocking -- Daniel Boone: empire builder or philosopher of primitivism? -- Leatherstocking and the problem of social order -- The innocence and wildness of nature: Charles W. Webber and others -- The mountain man as western hero: Kit Carson -- The western hero in the dime novel: from Seth Jones to Deadwood Dick -- Buffalo Bill and Buck Taylor -- The dime novel heroine -- Book Three: The garden of the world -- The garden of the world and American agrarianism -- The yeoman and the fee-simple empire -- The south and the myth of the garden -- The new calculus of western energies -- The agrarian utopia in politics: the Homestead Act -- The garden and the desert -- The empire redivivus -- Failure of the agrarian utopia -- The myth of the garden and reform of the land system -- The garden as safety valve -- The agricultural west in literature: I. Cooper and the stages of society -- II. From Caroline Kirkland to Hamlin Garland -- The myth of the garden and Turner's frontier hypothesis.
Additional Physical Form available Note:: Also issued online.