The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860

by Annette Kolodny

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469619552
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	07/01/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	314
Lexile:	1610L (what's this?)
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Annette Kolodny is former Dean of the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona. She currently teaches courses on ecocriticism and the American frontiers at the University of Arizona.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

This is not only a masterful work of scholarship and organization, but a much-needed counter-balance to the much-articulated myth of the American Adam. . . . In redeeming this material from oblivion, Annette Kolodny permits us a privileged look at roots we may otherwise never have known we had.—Margaret Atwood



[Kolodny's] ambitious study of women's changing responses to the experience of settling the American continent radically revises our understanding of both American history and American literature. . . . Again and again, her sensitivity to issues of gender has led her to see familiar texts in dazzlingly original ways.—Journal of English and Germanic Philology



Masterful . . . . It reads like a good detective story, and appeals to the same instincts for discovery of the hidden, for problem solving. In redeeming this material from oblivion, Annette Kolodny permits us a privileged look at roots we may otherwise never have known we had.'

Editorial Reviews

ÝKolodny's¨ ambitious study . . . radically revises our understanding of both American history and American literature.

"Journal of English and Germanic Philology"

[Kolodny's] ambitious study . . . radically revises our understanding of both American history and American literature.

"Journal of English and Germanic Philology"

Annette Kolodny permits us a privileged look at roots we may otherwise never have known we had.

Margaret Atwood

From the Publisher