The Prairie Frontier ed. by Sandra Looney, Arthur Husebo, and Geoffrey Hunt

Abstract

70 V/estern American Literature The Prairie Frontier. Edited bySandra Looney, Arthur Huseboe, and Geoffrey Hunt. (Sioux Falls, South Dakota: The Norland Heritage Foundation/ Augustana College, 1984. 166 pages, $6.95.) This collection of eleven essays and an introduction which summarizes and justifies each one is the third in a series on “the cultural heritage of Siouxland,” the ultimate term in the phrase the invention of Frederick Manfred [Feike Feikema] for the setting of his novels and poems. The essays were originally presented at a “Nordland Fest” in Sioux Falls. As a conse­ quence the essays have an oral quality about them—one, in fact, is a trans­ cription of an interview conducted in 1977. Manfred isthe subjectof one essay, “Bard of Siouxland,” byNancy Owen Nelson, and the author of one, “Old Voices in My Writings.” Other subjects are Indian “literature” (the term broadly defined), plains women in litera­ ture, wildness and human values, and immigrant letters and diaries. Two essays present the Norwegian-American novelist Ole Relvaag in the words of two men who knew him personally. Another essay focuses on the experiences of two Germans, Lutheran ministers, in Crow country in Montana in 1858, and still another discusses sources and approaches for historical research in small towns. The eleventh essay, on the fragility of paper used in books and journals, seems out of place, something like a small child at a political gathering. The rationale for the collection is best offered by Professor Alice T. Gasque in her study of “Plains Women in Literature”: [Many] writers have moved in and out of the literary canon, largely because of social changesin our culture. In the last fewyears, the literary canon has been under reconstruction by representatives of several [minority] groups who were earlier excluded . .. by the social, economic, and political biases of the literary establishment (26). If we can accept that thesis (and as author of literary histories of Iowa and Chicago, I can) we will appreciate this collection of essays; the attempt here is to “canonize” writers and subjects hitherto deemed beneath the attention of our literary “fathers.” The most significant person discussed is Rolvaag, who, although he is recognized by many as the second best of novelists of the midwest prairie, does not appear in such studies as Sixteen Modern American Authors, a collectionwhich listsonlyCather and Fitzgerald as significant writers from the prairie states. CLARENCE A. ANDREWS Iowa City, Iowa ...