Honyocker Dreams: Montana Memories

Whether they were actually Hungarian or Bohemian, “Hunkies” or “Bohunks,” or even from Eastern Europe at all, to the old ranchers of the Great Plains, the farmers and settlers who moved in and fenced off the open land were no-account “Honyockers.” And to Honyockers like David Mogen’s people, who built lives in the face of great difficulty and prejudice, the name came to bear all the meaning and power of their hard-won home place. It is this sense of place, of tenacious if uneasy belonging, that David Mogen traces through his family history in Honyocker Dreams. Beginning with his father’s reminiscences as he surveys the Montana landscape, Mogen weaves a narrative of memory and history, of the dreams and disappointments of working-class farmers, cowboys, and miners among his ancestors, and of the post-frontier world of Indian reservations and farming towns that endure on the Montana “Hi-Line,” the flat expanse of Big Sky country that lies hard against the Canadian border east of the Rockies. From the frontier world of his parents and pioneer ancestors to the boom-and-bust tales about growing up in the small-town world of his own Montana childhood in the 1950s, Mogen travels full circle to recent journeys that reveal the paradoxical burdens and strengths of his father’s cowboy legacy as well as the hidden pain and healing power of his mother’s homesteading heritage. His is a journey that opens a window on a unique but little-known region of Montana and the West.

Biographies & Memoirs

Mogen, David

Community & Culture

University Of Nebraska Press

Bison Books

Analyzes Bradbury's short stories and novels and offers insight to his life and career

Ray Bradbury (Twayne's United States Authors Series)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Twayne Pub

This collection of thirteen essays on American literature and culture defines and examines a gothic tradition in frontier writing. As the imaginative border between the known and the unknown, the frontier subject has provided a bridge to gothic domains and has been used by writers from every period in American history to explore social, ethnic, and gender frontiers, as well as frontiers of art and language. The frontier gothic world, for all of its ambiguity and ambivalence, is nevertheless immanent, palpable, and undeniably present, and it impinges significantly upon the conventional world, forcing that world to change, to adapt, to transform itself or be destroyed. The essays consider canonical writers such as Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville; they also discuss Mary Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edward Abbey, William Gibson, Gerald Vizenor, Leslie Silko, and Rudolfo Anaya. Also included is a previously uncollected short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Giant Wistaria," discussed by essayist Gary Scharnhorst as "A Hieroglyph of the Female Frontier Gothic." In American literature, the frontier gothic tradition expresses the spirit of a nation proud of its pragmatic realism and hungry for romance, vigorously pursuing a manifest destiny in the light of day, yet troubled and enraptured by gothic intimations of twilight apparitions, midnight curses, and the demons that haunt the last hour before dawn.

Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature

Sanders, Scott P.

Literary

UNKNO

The frontier has evoked a set of images, attitudes, and assumptions that have shaped a peculiarly American literary heritage. This volume reconsiders the whole of American literary tradition by focusing on the imaginative impact of the frontier mythology. Exploring the aesthetic implications of frontier experience, these essays also illustrate the vigorous debate among scholars regarding canon formation. Long dominated by the works of white males from the northeastern region of the country, the American literary canon continues to expand to include works by minorities, women, and authors from various parts of the nation. The eighteen scholars represented here focus on the importance of frontier mythology to many American writers, both traditional and new, thus providing meaningful context for further altering the American canon to include their works.The authors emphasize frontier mythology's central role in the literary dialogue as they discuss such topics as contemporary fiction, regional literature, nature writing, drama, film, and science fiction and focus on writers ranging from Mary Rowlandson and Emily Dickinson to N. Scott Momaday and Rolando Hinojosa. Taken as a whole, this collection asserts that frontier experience has historically created a symbolic vocabulary that is intrinsically dialectical, having elicited ironic responses from the different perspectives of women and minority writers, for example. Scholars and students of American literature will also see from these essays that frontier mythology in American literary tradition shows remarkable continuity, and that an understanding of the dialectical and dialogic nature of this inherited literary tradition will expand the canon and enrich the interpretations of the American dream.

Frontier Experience and the American Dream: Essays on American Literature

Busby, Mark

Bryant, Paul

Reference

Texas A&M University Press

The frontier has evoked a set of images, attitudes, and assumptions that have shaped a peculiarly American literary heritage. This volume reconsiders the whole of American literary tradition by focusing on the imaginative impact of the frontier mythology. Exploring the aesthetic implications of frontier experience, these essays also illustrate the vigorous debate among scholars regarding canon formation. Long dominated by the works of white males from the northeastern region of the country, the American literary canon continues to expand to include works by minorities, women, and authors from various parts of the nation. The eighteen scholars represented here focus on the importance of frontier mythology to many American writers, both traditional and new, thus providing meaningful context for further altering the American canon to include their works. The authors emphasize frontier mythology's central role in the literary dialogue as they discuss such topics as contemporary fiction, regional literature, nature writing, drama, film, and science fiction and focus on writers ranging from Mary Rowlandson and Emily Dickinson to N. Scott Momaday and Rolando Hinojosa. Taken as a whole, this collection asserts that frontier experience has historically created a symbolic vocabulary that is intrinsically dialectical, having elicited ironic responses from the different perspectives of women and minority writers, for example. Scholars and students of American literature will also see from these essays that frontier mythology in American literary tradition shows remarkable continuity, and that an understanding of the dialectical and dialogic nature of this inherited literary tradition will expand the canon and enrich the interpretations of the American dream.

Wilderness Visions: Science Fiction Westerns, Vol. I

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Borgo Pr

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