An Abstract of an Essay

[aquaeri]

ETA: Please read this before this post. Note that this is not a post about RaceFail.

My head is full of thoughts and ideas, partly based on my RaceFail readings, particularly thrown up by

Comments

[joycemocha]

You raise a good point about the effectiveness of the original texts when writing about the genre with regard to Laura Ingalls Wilder and Jane Austen.

That said, Wilder did not found the genre. It existed before her and alongside her, both in YA and in adult writings. Most of it is now thankfully obscure and hidden from the ages because it truly is that hideous--such as the Oregon Trail story I noted in my post last night. Compared to some of her predecessors and contemporaries, Wilder comes off as enlightened.

If you ever get a chance, a good palate cleanser is the reading of H.L. Davies and James Stevens's Status Rerum. I'll try to look up any possible online links, but basically, Stevens and Davies were taking potshots at the particularly tripe-laded, purplish-prosed romantic frontier stories that were oozing out of the Pacific Northwest at the time. And while Davies shows the bias of his era when writing about Indians, at least his Indians are consistent with the rest of his characters--they all seem to be equally grumpy,

[joycemocha]

Ah!

Start here:

http://www.washington.edu/uwired/outreach/cspn/Website/Hist%20n%20Lit/lit%20main.html

Read all the links. Excellent material--while it's primarily Pacific Northwest, there's a lot which could hold true for a lot of Western American regions.