The Image and Influence of the Oklahoma Prairie in Washington Irving's Tour of the West (Studies in American Literature, 67) - Hardcover

Steele, Linda

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 077346459X ISBN 13: 9780773464599

Publisher: Edwin Mellen Pr, 2004

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Steele (English, U. of Central Oklahoma) analyzes American writer Irving's A Tour of the Prairies, which was based on the personal journals he kept daily on an 1832 journey through was then Indian country with another American and two European writers. She argues that his image of the plains is more than a well-crafted metaphor romantically portraying progress and expansion within the framework of The Frontier. Rather, she finds it to be a self-sufficient, linguistic catalyst revealing the Oklahoma environment of the time interacting with him, an effect divorced from the frontier myth. She considers his expectations and experiences, a new image, the fulfillment of the image and the self, and the beauty and significance of the work. The text is double spaced. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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About the Author

Linda Steele earned a B.A. in English Education and an M.A. in English from the University of Central Oklahoma. She received a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond, Oklahoma.

Review

"Linda L. Steele's analysis of Washington Irving's A Tour of the Prairies in this present study, The Environment and the Self, resonates at three levels: the cultural psyche, Romantic ideology, and personal experience. In the first instance, American writers and readers have long joined in a symbiotic cord of identity through land and landscape. In the second, since the fusion of American Romantic ideology through the work of the Transcendentalists, writers and readers have raised that cultural transaction to a philosophy of awareness and intuitive knowledge with benefit for the individual. And finally, with the strong pragmatic individualism in the culture, members within it have found meaning through the architecture of their birth landscape and its early nurturing contribution to self understanding. Typically, that self understanding finds congruence in a haunting sense of alienation and isolation, but the feeling is a comforting one to ponder before returning to the corresponding alienation and isolation of respective groups which claim individual loyalties..... Her work, The Environment and the Self: An Examination of the Image of the Prairie and the Myth of the Frontier in Washing Irving's A Tour on the Prairies, provides a new and elevated approach to one of Irving's less read works and promises to put the book on a new level of interpretation." -(From the Commendatory Preface) Gladys S. Lewis, PhD; "In The Image and Influence of the Oklahoma Prairie in Washington Irving's Tour of the West, Dr. Linda Steele expresses in words the feeling that many people develop over a lifetime about progress and its effect on the environment. Change brings loss. Even what some may consider positive change means losing the past. Because of the venue for her study, Oklahomans should find this book particularly interesting as a specific account of our state's colorful past. Steele's contention that "the frontier is not a place, but the prairie is" crystallizes the thesis and main intent of the book. Although other criticism of Irving focuses on his major works, Steele's life on the prairie in Nebraska and Oklahoma has prepared her to write this book. She looks at actual experience, giving readers a feeling of returning to early day Oklahoma. She visits the actual locations of the original tour, and her descriptions bring life to Irving's era and his work. Through her words, we can see the prairie as it was and as it is. After reading the book, one is motivated to visit the locations to see the monuments that Dr. Steele describes.....the book affects readers in a profound way. Dr. Steele's careful analysis causes readers to confront their own cognitive dissonance between the need for progress and the desire to preserve nature." - Mary Spelman, Ph.D., University of Central Oklahoma"

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