Literature of the American West and Frontier (Identities and Issues in Literature)
Introduction
For Americans, the frontier will always be a literal and mythic place. Even as early settlers struggled against a harsh landscape to create new homes for themselves, a variety of thinkers sought to present the frontier as a figurative place where pioneers could make themselves into whatever they wanted to be. Certain ideas closely associated with the frontier—self-reliance, individualism, Manifest Destiny, regeneration, even democracy—were designed to portray a young America as a place where one’s future was absolutely a matter of what one was willing to make...
[The entire page is 2237 words long]
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