Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth / Edition 2

by Henry Nash Smith

Overview

The spell that the West has always exercised on the American people had its most intense impact on American literature and thought during the nineteenth century. Henry Nash Smith shows, with vast comprehension, the influence of the nineteenth-century West in all its variety and strength, in special relation to social, economic, cultural, and political forces. He traces the myths and symbols of the Westward movement such as the general notion of a Westward-moving Course of Empire, the Wild Western hero, the virtuous yeoman-farmer—in such varied nineteenth-century writings as Leaves of Grass, the great corpus of Dime Novels, and most notably, Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Frontier in American History. Moreover, he synthesizes the imaginative expression of Western myths and symbols in literature with their role in contemporary politics, economics, and society, embodied in such forms as the idea of Manifest Destiny, the conflict in the American mind between idealizations of primitivism on the one hand and of progress and civilization on the other, the Homestead Act of 1862, and public-land policy after the Civil War.

The myths of the American West that found their expression in nineteenth-century words and deeds remain a part of every American’s heritage, and Smith, with his insight into their power and significance, makes possible a critical appreciation of that heritage.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674939554
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	10/01/1971
Series:	Harvard Paperbacks Series
Edition description:	Reissued, with a new preface
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.83(d)

Table of Contents

PROLOGUE: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ORIGINS

PART 1: PASSAGE TO INDIA

1. A Highway to the Pacific: Thomas Jefferson and the

Editorial Reviews

A very illuminating study in the history of ideas. Its principal theme is the rise and decline of the conception of the West as an agrarian utopia the myth of the ‘garden of the world’ that implanted itself so deeply in the imagination of nineteenth-century America. Professor Smith brings to his study an unusual adeptness in the integration of material from different fields, and, what is more important, an admirable feeling for shadings and distinctions, for the complexly organic relationship between empiric fact and what human emotion and imagination would make of it… Virgin Land achieves a kind of clarification of its subject that makes it, one feels, a landmark in the interpretation of the West.

The Nation

This brilliant interpretative analysis will make a permanent contribution to a better understanding of the role of the West in American history.

Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences

To read Virgin Land is to experience a deep intellectual excitement.

Christian Science Monitor

Mr. Smith’s book is a work of solid scholarship on a facet of our history that has not always been assessed at its proper importance. Here…is the story of all our yesterdays.

Washington Post

A very illuminating study in the history of ideas. Its principal theme is the rise and decline of the conception of the West as an agrarian utopia the myth of the 'garden of the world' that implanted itself so deeply in the imagination of nineteenth-century America. Professor Smith brings to his study an unusual adeptness in the integration of material from different fields, and, what is more important, an admirable feeling for shadings and distinctions, for the complexly organic relationship between empiric fact and what human emotion and imagination would make of it... Virgin Land achieves a kind of clarification of its subject that makes it, one feels, a landmark in the interpretation of the West.-- "The Nation"

Mr. Smith's book is a work of solid scholarship on a facet of our history that has not always been assessed at its proper importance. Here...is the story of all our yesterdays.-- "Washington Post"

This brilliant interpretative analysis will make a permanent contribution to a better understanding of the role of the West in American history.-- "Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences"

To read Virgin Land is to experience a deep intellectual excitement.-- "Christian Science Monitor"

From the Publisher

Mr. Smith’s book is a work of solid scholarship on a facet of our history that has not always been assessed at its proper importance. Here…is the story of all our yesterdays.

Washington Post

A very illuminating study in the history of ideas. Its principal theme is the rise and decline of the conception of the West as an agrarian utopia the myth of the 'garden of the world' that implanted itself so deeply in the imagination of nineteenth-century America. Professor Smith brings to his study an unusual adeptness in the integration of material from different fields, and, what is more important, an admirable feeling for shadings and distinctions, for the complexly organic relationship between empiric fact and what human emotion and imagination would make of it...'Virgin Land' achieves a kind of clarification of its subject that makes it, one feels, a landmark in the interpretation of the West.

Nation