Reading for Liberalism: The Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West - Hardcover

Mexal, Stephen J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0803240198 ISBN 13: 9780803240193

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2013

Synopsis

Founded in 1868, the Overland Monthly was a San Francisco–based literary magazine whose mix of humor, pathos, and romantic nostalgia for a lost frontier was an immediate sensation on the East Coast. Due in part to a regional desire to attract settlers and financial investment, the essays and short fiction published in the Overland Monthly often portrayed the American West as a civilized evolution of, and not a savage regression from, eastern bourgeois modernity and democracy.

Stories about the American West have for centuries been integral to the way we imagine freedom, the individual, and the possibility for alternate political realities. Reading for Liberalism examines the shifting literary and narrative construction of liberal selfhood in California in the late nineteenth century through case studies of a number of western American writers who wrote for the Overland Monthly, including Noah Brooks, Ina Coolbrith, Bret Harte, Jack London, John Muir, and Frank Norris, among others. Reading for Liberalism argues that Harte, the magazine’s founding editor, and the other members of the Overland group critiqued and reimagined the often invisible fabric of American freedom. Reading for Liberalism uncovers and examines in the text of the Overland Monthly the relationship between wilderness, literature, race, and the production of individual freedom in late nineteenth-century California. 

About this title

About the Author:

Stephen J. Mexal is an associate professor of English at California State University, Fullerton.

Review:

"[Reading for Liberalism] provides a valuable perspective on Western literature, especially the field of popular magazines, so important to the shaping of American attitudes toward the frontier West."—C. Gilbert Storms, Journal of Arizona History (C. Gilbert Storms Journal of Arizona History 2014-11-13)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0803240198
• ISBN 13: 9780803240193
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320