Movement and adjustment in twentieth-century Western writing
Abstract
Western American literature in the twentieth century has effectively mirrored life in the
region. The West has for centuries seen more geographic movement, and accompanying
cultural adjustment, than other American regions. These themes of movement and adjustment
have dominated western writing. Literary historians’ frameworks for categorizing
and analyzing this writing have emphasized a tidy process of organic development
in western writing, from “frontier fiction” to more mature “regional writing,” or
from frontier to regional to post- regional literature. Such models underestimate the degree
to which movement and adjustment continued to shape western writing in the
twentieth century and tend to separate literature produced by white Europeans from
that of other cultural groups. This essay suggests that the more fluid movement and
adjustment model can better illuminate the connections between ostensibly separate
cultural literary streams.
Citation
Wrobel, David M. "Movement and Adjustment in Twentieth-Century Western Writing." Pacific Historical Review 72, no. 3 (2003): 393-404.
Related file
http://phr.ucpress.edu/content/72/3/393http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/phr.2003.72.3.393