Description
Book SynopsisGeographic Personas explores how writers, dancers, actors, imposters, and con artists were influenced by three transformative factors—population growth, technology, and literary realism—that contributed to their personal reinvention during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the American West.
Trade Review"Allmendinger interweaves a bevy of first-hand, contemporaneous accounts with more-recent literary examinations."—K. Edgerton,
Choice"An engaging and insightful story."—Richard Stott,
Journal of Arizona History“Allmendinger’s chapters combine literary and cultural criticism with brief, pungent biographies. The endnotes alone provide a rich tour of some strange and illuminating byways. The learning is carried very lightly and provides another welcome installment in the Allmendinger project.”—David Wyatt, author of
When America Turned: Reckoning with 1968Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Map and the Territory
1. Geographic Personas: The Passing of Clarence King
2. Lord of the Limber Tongue: The Great Spanish Land Grant Fraud and the Barony of Arizona
3. A French Canadian Cowboy: Branding Will James
4. Making an Indian: The Case of Sylvester Long
5. L’Ouest Bohème: Willa Cather’s Transnational Prairie
6. A Homeless Snail: Yone Noguchi and Japanese Self-Invention
7. The Past Is the Biggest Country of All: Remembering Helena Modjeska
8. Deutschland über Alles: Germany’s Literary Colonization of the U.S. Frontier
9. The Problem of Representation: Isadora Duncan Sleeps With the Russian Navy
Afterword: Burials and Exhumations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
