Book Review: Manifest and Other Destinies: Territorial Fictions of the Nineteenth-Century United States

Authors

• Bethany Schneider, Bryn Mawr College

Date of this Version

2006

Document Type

Article

Comments

Published in GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY 26:3 (Summer 2006). Copyright © 2006 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

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.