Title: Regeneration through violence : the mythology of the American frontier, 1600-1860 /
Authors: Slotkin, Richard, 1942-
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press,
Year: 2000
Subjects: American literature History and criticism; Frontier and pioneer life in literature.; National characteristics, American, in literature.; Regeneration in literature.; Violence in literature.; Myth in literature.
Abstract: "In Regeneration through Violence, the first of his trilogy on the mythology of the American West, Richard Slotkin shows how the attitudes and traditions that shape American culture evolved from the social and psychological anxieties of European settlers struggling in a strange new world to claim the land and displace the Native Americans. Using the popular literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries - including captivity narratives, the Daniel Boone tales, and the writings of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville - Slotkin traces the full development of this myth."--Jacket.
Contents: 1. Myth and literature in a new world -- 2. Cannibals and Christians : European vs. American Indian culture -- 3. A home in the heart of darkness : the origins of the Indian war narratives (1625-1682) -- 4. Israel in Babylon : the archetype of the captivity narratives (1682-1700) -- 5. A palisade of language : captivity mythology and the social crisis (1688-1693) -- 6. The hunting of the beast : initiation or exorcism? (1675-1725) -- 7. The search for a hero and the problem of the "natural man" (1700-1765) -- 8. A gallery of types : the evolution of literary genres and the image of the American (1755-1785) -- 9. Narrative into myth : the emergence of a hero (1784) -- 10. Evolution of the national hero : farmer to hunter to Indian (1784-1855) -- 11. Society and solitude : the frontier myth in romantic literature (1795-1825) -- 12. The fragmented image : the Boone myth and sectional cultures (1820-1850) -- 13. Man without a cross : the Leatherstocking myth (1823-1841) -- 14. A pyramid of skulls.