Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
2004
Abstract
"If the West tells us anything," says William Handley, "it is that stories have powerful consequences." This book reads western stories anew, not as familiar tales of individualism but as family dramas with newly thought-provoking consequences for the "nation's racial future." Handley argues that twentieth-century western literature is more preoccupied with marriage than with the frontier. Marriage serves as an analogy for US national unity while also exposing the uncontainable violence at the heart of nation-building. These stories demonstrate that, having destroyed the racial and ethnic "others" against whom the nation defined itself, "imperialism brings its guns home."
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 24:3 (Summer 2004). Copyright © 2004 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.