The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers

To discover how women constructed their own mythology of the West, Kolodny examines the evidence of three generations of womens writing about the frontier. She finds that, although the American frontiersman imagined the wilderness as virgin land, an unspoiled Eve to be taken, the pioneer woman at his side dreamed more modestly of a garden to be cultivated. Both intellectual and cultural history, this volume continues Kolodnys study of frontier mythology begun in <i>The Lay of the Land</i>.