Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

William R. Handley examines literary interpretations of the Western American past. Handley asserts that although recent scholarship presents a narrative that counters optimistic frontier individualism by focusing on the victims of conquest, twentieth-century American fiction tells of intra-ethnic violence, involving marriages and families. He examines historiography and writing by Zane Grey, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner and Joan Didion among others.