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Book SynopsisTrade Review"
Before the West Was West marks a productive step back to the future."—Keri Holt,
Western Historical Quarterly"By asking early Americanists to understand that they can also be westernists, and by asking westernists to understand their work as early, Hamilton and Hillard compel scholars in both fields to continue testing the intersections and assumptions of their disciplines."—Edward Watts,
Early American Literature“The insights into the ‘when’ of the American West offered by this book are both timely and essential to our further understanding of how cultures developed in the contact zones of the northern parts of the western hemisphere.”—Nicolas S. Witschi, coeditor of
Dirty Words in Deadwood: Literature and the PostwesternTable of ContentsForeword by Michael P. Branch
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Reconsidering the “When” of the West
1. From Hunahpu to Hiawatha: The Passion of Corn and the Sublimation of Violence in Native American Mythmaking
Paul G. Zolbrod
2. When the East Was West: Vinland in the American Imaginary
Annette Kolodny
3. Accommodating Presence: Esteban, Fray Marcos, and the Problem of Literary Translation on the American Frontier
Cassander L. Smith
4. Captured by Genre: Mary Rowlandson’s Western Imagination on the Nineteenth-Century Frontier
John David Miles
5. The Royal Frontier: Colonist and Native Relations in Aphra Behn’s Virginia
Rebecca M. Lush
6. Frontier Commonwealths: Violence, Private Interest, and the Public Good in Hennepin’s A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America
David J. Peterson
7. The Bad Guys Wear Tricornered Hats: The Villasur Massacre of 1720 and the Segesser II Hide Painting in Spanish and French Colonial Literature
Gordon M. Sayre
8. The Removes of Harriot Stuart: Charlotte Lennox and the Birth of the Western
Marta Kvande and Sara Spurgeon
9. Contrast and Contradiction: The Emergent West in Crèvecoeur’s Regional Theory
Tara Penry
10. The Business of Heaven and Earth: Toponymy and the Imperial Idyll in the Domínguez-Escalante Journal of 1776
George English Brooks
11. An Eighteenth-Century Narrative of Encounter in the Trans-Mississippi West: Jean-Baptiste Trudeau on the Missouri River
Robert Woods Sayre
12. Harmonizing the “West”: Jefferson’s Account of Louisiana and American Identity
Renaud Contini
Contributors
Index
