Reading for Liberalism: The Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West by Stephen J. Mexal (review)

Reading the entire run of a monthly magazine as a singular text is certainly not an easy task. Setting aside the fact that the content over the years will have been the work of hundreds of different writers, just the shifting from year to year of economic, political, or even simply editorial contexts will result in a far more disparate and polyvocal text than any novel or poem could ever be. However, it is certainly not impossible, as Stephen Mexal capably demonstrates in Reading for Liberalism. With its analysis of contributions by a number of significant authors from roughly forty years of the Overland Monthly, Mexal’s book makes a compelling case for understanding, in at least one specific context, how a magazine may be read as offering a singular idea worthy of close interpretation. First published in San Francisco in 1868 as a self-styled regional alternative to the likes of Boston’s Atlantic Monthly and New York’s Harper’s, the Overland published the works of such noted western writers as Bret Harte (the magazine’s inaugural editor), Noah Brooks, John Muir, Ina Coolbrith, Frank Norris, and Jack London, among others. And in reading through several decades of material, Mexal uncovers a theme to which the magazine ostensibly returns again and again with every generation, namely political liberalism. When read in relation to the magazine’s equally recurrent representations of more familiar western American topics—wilderness, race, and the role of state institutions in the lives of citizens—the literary representations of “individual autonomy and the virtues of self-interest” (6) reveal, according to Mexal, a magazine very much engaged in a self-critical examination of the costs of westward-bound nationalism.

Methodologically, Reading for Liberalism is best described as a series of extensive close readings of perhaps no more than a few dozen individual stories, essays, and poems. On the one hand, the stated purpose of the book signals exactly that: “a series of case studies of the rhetorical and narrative construction of liberal individualism in California” (4) or, in a word, a reading. On the other hand, the generally uneven contextualizing of the selected texts within their larger discursive fields appears to contradict such comprehensive-seeming assertions as the following: “in the late nineteenth century the Overland group used literary aesthetics to render liberalism visible and yoke it to the civic development of California” (231). Thus, one would do well not to expect, on the basis of either the book’s subtitle or the occasional statement that appears to promise something more comprehensive, a thorough analysis of what the magazine claimed to be and what cultural work it actually performed in its entirety. Reading for Liberalism is at its best when illuminating how certain stories and essays from more than forty years of the Overland’s history thematized political liberalism as it was evolving and being questioned in the American West; indeed, the chapter on the limits to liberal individualism represented in Norris’s and London’s versions of naturalism is especially worth attending to.