The Frontier Experience and the American Dream: Essays on American Literature edited by David Mogen, Mark Busby, and Paul Bryant (review)

120Rocky Mountain Review DAVID MÖGEN, MARK BUSBY, and PAUL BRYANT, eds. The Frontier Experience and the American Dream: Essays on American Literature. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1989. 282 p. A collection of generally excellent essays addressing some of the vexing canonical questions in American literature, The Frontier Experience and the American Dream, its editors say, "reconsiders the American literary tradition from colonial times to the present by focusing on the imaginative impact of the frontier experience." Their thesis is that "historically the existence of a frontier of settlement, and of unsettled and even unknown lands beyond, has generated in the American literary imagination a set ofimages, attitudes, and assumptions that have shaped our literature into a peculiarly American mold." "Ultimately," they continue, "we believe that this book will help refocus and restructure the American literature curriculum" (3). Thesis is a crucial term in the editors' introduction, for predictably they, like their contributors, chafe against the limitations of Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis; moreover, the editors in particular wish to establish an alternative one oftheir own. "By illustrating how mythology derived from the frontier experience historically shapes and criticizes versions of the 'American Dream,' " they say, "we hope to show how neither the established canon nor critical analyses of that canon have adequately recognized some of the distinctive qualities of American literature" (5). Boldly they propose that "the frontier idea structures a Great Tradition in American literature" and hope to show "how this mythical context [i.e., "mythical archetypes, symbols, and narrative patterns"] illuminates the main traditions of American writing" (8). One is arrested by the emphasis on thesis in the introduction, wondering how the editors succeeded in orchestrating this complex project. The introduction sounds like the beginning of a thesis book. Ifthat were the case, one would fault the editors for not stating their thesis more sharply with respect to such terms they use as mythical archetypes, mythical context, symbols, dialectical, or dialogic. Reconsidering, one concludes that the introduction sounds, in fact, more like the prospectus for such a book. Of course, much of what is promised in the introduction is delivered in the following essays, three of them being works by each of the editors. The eighteen essays are divided, three to five per group, under the following headings: 1) General, 2) Period Studies, 3) Regional Adaptations, 4) Multicultural Perspectives, and 5) Genres. In useful and legitimate ways, they build on and extend the achievements of Edwin Fussell's Frontier: American Literature and the American West (1965), Richard Slotkin's Regeneration through Violence (1973) and The Fatal Environment (1985), Annette Kolodny's The Lay ofthe Land (1973) and The Land Before Her (1984), and other related studies. While they are broad-ranging and deal with such topics as nature writing, drama, film, and science fiction and with figures ranging from Mary Rowlandson and Emily Dickinson to Rolando Hinojosa and Rodolfo Anaya (who is author ofone ofthe essays in the collection), the essays are most informative about women, Native Americans, and Chícanos in the frontier experience. Of course, there is some unevenness among the essays, but they are all substantive Book Reviews121 contributions to the dialectical or dialogic (the editors view these terms as interchangeable) discourse required to revise and revalue the frontier experience and its role in the expression of the "American Dream." In the midst of reading all this energetic revisionism, however, one smiles and gives a slight nod of recognition to the voice of the following sentence, which measures how far such discussions have come and probably indicates how far they have yet to go: "This loop I toss is wide, encompassing much, but I think it is important to round up as much as possible to prove my point . . ." (103). As the editors readily acknowledge in their introduction, they have included no individual essays on Blacks or Asian-Americans and their writers in the collection, but there are numerous indications in the book of how these groups could be included as the loop is widened, so to speak. Nevertheless, some readers may understandably complain that the Blacks and AsianAmericans should have been gathered in the first roundup. Among the riches offered...