Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
2004
Abstract
The Virginian is here to stay. For most of the first century of its life, critics gave their attention to what they found on the novel's face: the rugged hero, conquest, a reinvigorated national identity, the triumph of patriarchal law and of good over evil. It was a tale out of Turner. This timely new volume confirms and elaborates recent, revisionist moves to overturn the consensus reading and replace it with interrogations of the novel's competing, even contradictory perspectives in matters of race, class, and gender. Once the embodiment of a faith in the American character and mission, The Virginian commences its second century as a complex expression of how our errand into the wilderness has gone astray.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 24:1 (Winter 2004). Copyright © 2004 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.