Abstract This essay describes and defines the genre that has come to be known as Southwestern American Literature. Four novels, Tony Hillerman's "Dance Hall of the Dead", Edward Abbey's "Fire on the Mountain", Cormac McCarthy's "All the Pretty Horses" and Rudolfo Anaya's "Bless Me, Ultima" are analyzed to reveal how they contribute to this genre. Distinct landscapes and distinct characters inhabit these books, offering a panoply of cactus, desert, mountains, cowboys, cattlemen, Native Americans and Chicanos, all possessing a sense of alienation from the rest of the world. Southwestern literature, in summary, as this essay shows is about an appreciation of the wilderness and humans with a frontier mentality who are always seeking another open vista.
From the Paper "Southwestern American literature forms a distinct genre with a sharp flavor that includes land and geography and attitudes and people. The landscape was there before a diversity of peoples sank their spiritual and physical roots into soil as varied as their voices. This literature is the empty land of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, of the four corners area, stretching even down through Texas into old Mexico. This land of cactus, desert, and mountains, and it's inhabitants, cowboys, Indians, and Chicanos, possess a sense of separation or alienation from the rest of the world. Southwestern literature is about an appreciation of the wilderness and humans with a frontier mentality who are always seeking another open vista. It is wide open spaces and emptiness, a barren but beautiful paradise, and the very real humans who live there. Offering what Rudolfo Anaya calls " the spirit of the place" (Dunaway ix-xvi), Southwestern literature is about character, men who are men, tough, stubborn humans who face hard facts with spirit. It is about cactus and desert and mountains and the folklore of native Americans, Chicano, and cowboys. Southwest Literature offers a picante taste that lingers on the inner tongue, a flavor of place and people, it includes both "surface" and "soul"(Dunaway ix), becoming a uniquely American "magical realism" (Dunaway 31)."
Abstract Limerick's book is a work of synthesis designed to suggest a new, comprehensive ground on which the history of the American West, often fragmented into many different branches, can be approached afresh. The paper discusses Limerick's view that, contrary to popular thinking based on the ideas by Frederick Jackson Turner that the American Frontier closed officially in 1890, the 'settling of the west' experience was not an exclusively European domain. The book reminds the reader of the Indians, Hispanics, Asians and women whose involvement in the Western history was not a minor matter.
From the Paper "As Limerick notes in discussing current events that may have an impact on further shaping the West, every historian operates from a presentist context and it was a mistake for historians to ignore the fact that Turner's presentism exerted a particularly limiting force on his thesis. If historians today look at the continuities and common themes of Western history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rather than adhering to the artificial 1890 watershed imposed by Turner's thesis, they will certainly, even if they do not accept every aspect of Limerick's own thesis, develop a means of viewing Western history in a comprehensive fashion."
Tags: savage, wilderness, cattlemen, Native, American
