Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
2006
Abstract
Stephanie LeMenager's Manifest and Other Destinies is a beautifully researched, elegantly written, authoritative and long-needed reexamination of the fictions that girded American expansion. It is also a model of inventive and interventative scholarship. Across three sections, entitled "Desert," "Ocean," and "River," LeMenager's revelatory readings of Cooper, Melville, Irving, Twain, and dozens of other nineteenth-century novelists, journalists, memoirists, and political commentators explore representations of environments that actively resisted or transformed white agrarian settlement. This is a literary history of the nineteenth-century United States that radically rewrites received understandings of the force and direction of expansionist ideologies across the century.
Comments
Published in GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY 26:3 (Summer 2006). Copyright © 2006 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.