| Placing the West is a study of the literature of the American West, beginning with the early 20th-century works of Willa Cather and O.E. Rolvaag, each of whom treat the settlement of the western Plains during the previous century, and continuing through fictions by N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Marilynne Robinson; finally, the study examines the contemporary Wests of Annie Proulx's Wyoming stories and Moises Kaufman's The Laramie Project. The book investigates the West as it is represented by the varied territories that stretch roughly from the Great Plains to the Sierra Nevada, excluding the three coastal states that were settled earlier and which developed a culture and literature distinct in many ways from the rest of the West. The study's approach to both the fiction and nonfiction of this region is interdisciplinary, informed by the diverse, post-colonial perspectives of New History, and guided by the philosophies of both human geography and place theory, which argue that the human concept of place, as well as the politics inherent in defining what counts as "in place," exert a fundamental force in shaping human identity. Through the lenses of these interpretive theories, Placing the West charts the transition from undefined space to human place as it is represented by (and enacted through) the literature of the West, and reveals the ongoing project of defining and expressing a Western identity in relation to both the landscape itself and the mythologized representations of it. |
