The spell that the West has always exercised on the American people
had its most intense impact on American literature and thought
during the nineteenth century. Smith shows, with vast
comprehension, the influence of the nineteenth-century West in all
its variety and strength, in special relation to social, economic,
cultural, and political forces. He traces the myths and symbols of
the Westward movement such as the general notion of a
Westward-moving Course of Empire, the Wild Western hero, the
virtuous yeoman-farmer--in such varied nineteenth-century writings
as "Leaves of Grass," the great corpus of Dime Novels, and most
notably, Frederick Jackson Turner's "The Frontier in American
History," Moreover, he synthesizes the imaginative expression of
Western myths and symbols in literature with their role in
contemporary politics, economics, and society, embodied in such
forms as the idea of Manifest Destiny, the conflict in the American
mind between idealizations of primitivism on the one hand and of
progress and civilization on the other, the Homestead Act of 1862,
and public-land policy after the Civil War.
The myths of the American West that found their expression in
nineteenth-century words and deeds remain a part of every
American's heritage, and Smith, with his insight into their power
and significance, makes possible a critical appreciation of that
heritage.
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