The frontier has evoked a set of images, attitudes, and assumptions that have shaped a peculiarly American literary heritage. This volume reconsiders the whole of American literary tradition by focusing on the imaginative impact of the frontier mythology. Exploring the aesthetic implications of frontier experience, these essays also illustrate the vigorous debate among scholars regarding canon formation. Long dominated by the works of white males from the northeastern region of the country, the American literary canon continues to expand to include works by minorities, women, and authors from...

A careful and meticulous study of the Western Theme in Science Fiction Literature. I.O. Evans Studies in the Philosophy and Criticism of Literature, Vol. 1

Whether they were actually Hungarian or Bohemian, Hunkies or Bohunks, or even from Eastern Europe at all, to the old ranchers of the Great Plains, the farmers and settlers who moved in and fenced off the open land were no-account Honyockers. And to Honyockers like David Mogen s people, who built lives in the face of great difficulty and prejudice, the name came to bear all the meaning and power of their hard-won home place. It is this sense of place, of tenacious if uneasy belonging, that David Mogen traces through his family history in Honyocker Dreams.
Beginning with his father s...

Honyocker Dreams: Montana Memories dramatizes "recovery" both as healing and as reconstruction of a past that haunts and enriches the present. David Mogen's narrative begins with his dying father's reminiscences as he surveys the Montana landscape, and then weaves through his own memories about the postfrontier world of Indian reservations and farming towns that endure on the Montana "Hi-Line," that flat expanse of Big Sky country that lies hard against the Canadian border east of the Rockies.
Mogen's journey of recovery includes heartfelt, often humorous stories defining his...