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The Land Before Her

Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860

Annette Kolodny

Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 07/2014
Pages: 314
Subject: History, Social Science, Literary Criticism | University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9.78081E+12
eBook ISBN: 9781469619552

DESCRIPTION

To discover how women constructed their own mythology of the West, Kolodny examines the evidence of three generations of women's writing about the frontier. She finds that, although the American frontiersman imagined the wilderness as virgin land, an unspoiled Eve to be taken, the pioneer woman at his side dreamed more modestly of a garden to be cultivated. Both intellectual and cultural history, this volume continues Kolodny's study of frontier mythology begun in The Lay of the Land.