Review of Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs

Authors

Sharon M. Harris, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Date of this Version

1992

Document Type

Article

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly 12:4 (Fall 1992). Copyright © 1992 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Abstract

In Removals Maddox exposes the complicity of many of our most treasured nineteenth-century American authors in the figurative-and consequently, quite literal-removal of American Indians from constructions of nineteenth century culture. That some of these authors viewed themselves as sympathetic to the "Indian question" merely demonstrates (as Maddox extends Roland Barthes' argument) how the myth of apoliticized discourse can result in the transformation of "history into nature."