The Great Plains have long been fertile ground for literature. The
Nature of the Place is a comprehensive study of novels and stories
by writers of that region. Drawing upon studies by cultural
geographers, historians, and literary critics, Diane Dufva Quantic
creates an expansive portrait of the region, its history, and its
literature. Quantic offers insightful readings of a staggering
array of authors, including Willa Cather, Wright Morris, Mari
Sandoz, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Frederick Manfred, Wallace Stegner,
and Bess Streeter Aldrich. She considers the literature of the
Plains and neighboring regions from early representations in such
works as James Fenimore Cooper's The Prairie, published in 1827,
through such contemporary authors as Douglas Unger and Ron Hansen.
For all its concentration upon individual writers and works,
however, The Nature of the Place is marked by Quantic's sustained
attention to the region's collective social and cultural history.
Central to that cumulative focus is the constant, immensely
fruitful clash between the myths of the Great Plains - myths
represented by such phrases as the Garden of the World, the Great
American Desert, the Closed Frontier, Manifest Destiny, and the
Safety Valve - and the infinitely more complex history of the
region. Quantic is always aware of how that clash, while most
productive of literature, has made a final, definitive vision of
the Great Plains impossible. In so vast and changeable a region it
is only fitting that, as Wright Morris once remarked, "Many things
would come to pass, but the nature of the place would remain a
matter of opinion".
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