Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City: Re-creating the Frontier WestFictions of Western American Domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850–1950Failed Frontiersmen: White Men and Myth in the Post-Sixties American Historical Romance

Abstract

Book Review| September 01 2021 Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City: Re-creating the Frontier WestFictions of Western American Domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850–1950Failed Frontiersmen: White Men and Myth in the Post-Sixties American Historical Romance Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City: Re-creating the Frontier West. By Britz, Kevin and Nichols, Roger L., Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press. 2018. xiii, 266 pp. Cloth, $32.95; e-book available.Fictions of Western American Domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850–1950. By Zink, Amanda J., Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press. 2018. xiii, 339 pp. Cloth, $75.00; e-book, $75.00.Failed Frontiersmen: White Men and Myth in the Post-Sixties American Historical Romance. By Donahue, James J., Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press. 2015. viii, 222 pp. Cloth, $59.50; paper, $27.50; e-book, $27.50. Janet Dean Janet Dean Janet Dean is professor and chair of English and cultural studies at Bryant University, where she writes and teaches about Native American literature, nineteenth-century women writers, and the cultures of political and social protest in the United States. She is the author of Unconventional Politics: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers and U.S. Indian Policy (2016), as well as essays, chapters, and reviews in a number of journals and collections. Her current work explores the significance of material culture in Native American literature. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2021) 93 (3): 533–536. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9361349 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Janet Dean; Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City: Re-creating the Frontier WestFictions of Western American Domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850–1950Failed Frontiersmen: White Men and Myth in the Post-Sixties American Historical Romance. American Literature 1 September 2021; 93 (3): 533–536. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9361349 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search Frederick Jackson Turner famously declared the United States frontier closed in 1893, but of course he was wrong: you can’t close an idea. As many historians, literary scholars, and cultural critics since Turner have suggested, the frontier is not a place in time but a grand mythology, a story of national formation in which violent conflict gives way to white patriarchal authority and the domestication of “wild” spaces and people. Rehearsed in every form of art and popular culture, frontier mythology is also a broken promise, since the moral order, homogeneous social accord, and economic prosperity it ascribes to white settlement never arrived. As such, it prompts Americans’ continuous engagement; we return to it again and again, either to reinvest in its premises or, more productively, to reevaluate and challenge them. Though they differ in the depths of their investigations, the books under review join the ongoing project of tracking... Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.