Failed Frontiersmen: White Men and Myth in the Post-Sixties American Historical Romance

by James J. Donahue

Overview

In Failed Frontiersmen, James Donahue writes that one of the founding and most persistent mythologies of the United States is that of the American frontier. Looking at a selection of twentieth-century American male fiction writers—E. L. Doctorow, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Gerald Vizenor, and Cormac McCarthy—he shows how they reevaluated the historical romance of frontier mythology in response to the social and political movements of the 1960s (particularly regarding the Vietnam War, civil rights, and the treatment of Native Americans). Although these writers focus on different moments in American history and different geographic locations, the author reveals their commonly held belief that the frontier mythology failed to deliver on its promises of cultural stability and political advancement, especially in the face of the multicultural crucible of the 1960s.

Cultural Frames, Framing Culture
American Literatures Initiative

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813936826
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	02/04/2015
Series:	Cultural Frames, Framing Culture
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

James J. Donahue, coeditor with Derek C. Maus of Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights, is Associate Professor of English and Communication at the State University of New York at Potsdam.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: The American Historical Frontier Romance as Vehicle for Cultural Critique 1

1 Rewriting the Historical Record: The "False Documents" and Failed Frontiersmen of E. L. Doctorow and John Barth 29

2 "Crimes of Demarcation": Spatial and Cultural Transgression in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon 65

3 The Signifyin' Cowboy: Ishmael Reed's Wild Western Reimaginations 94

4 Speaking for the Mixedblood Other: "Carefully Distorted" History in Gerald Vizenor's The Heirs of Columbus 115

5 "The World Which He Inherits Bears Him False Witness": A Reading of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and Border Trilogy 135

Coda: New Directions for the Mythology of the American Frontier 165

Notes 173

Bibliography 203

Index 219

Editorial Reviews

James Donahue's Failed Frontiersmen is a brilliant and close examination of post-1960s historical novels and their obsession with changing ideals of American masculinity. Donahue interrogates the persistence of masculine heroification in a collection of important texts from authors as wide-ranging as John Barth and Cormac McCarthy and illuminates their fixation on stories of failed masculinity within the hypermasculine and distinctly racialized spaces of various historical American frontiers. The detailed readings given to each novel, the analysis of the role of the frontier chronotope, and the critique of the figure of the frontiersman in these texts make an important and insightful contribution to masculinity and gender studies and to the ongoing process of mythologizing and demythologizing American history.

Sara Spurgeon

"James Donahue's Failed Frontiersmen is a brilliant and close examination of post-1960s historical novels and their obsession with changing ideals of American masculinity. Donahue interrogates the persistence of masculine heroification in a collection of important texts from authors as wide-ranging as John Barth and Cormac McCarthy and illuminates their fixation on stories of failed masculinity within the hypermasculine and distinctly racialized spaces of various historical American frontiers. The detailed readings given to each novel, the analysis of the role of the frontier chronotope, and the critique of the figure of the frontiersman in these texts make an important and insightful contribution to masculinity and gender studies and to the ongoing process of mythologizing and demythologizing American history. "—Sara Spurgeon, Texas Tech University, author of Exploding the Western: Myths of Empire on the Postmodern Frontier

From the Publisher