Plotting the Golden West
American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail

An examination of the literary and cultural reaction to the Californian Gold Rush of 1849–50.

Stephen Fender (Author)

9780521135719, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 25 February 2010

256 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.38 kg

This book focuses on the experience of the Californian Gold Rush of 1849–1850, not in terms of what happened (a subject much covered by historians) but in terms of how people of various levels of sophistication wrote about it. Drawing on a variety of sources - diaries, journals, letters, and contemporary journalism - Dr Fender explores how both amateur and professional writers attempted to come to terms with the physical wilderness of the transcontinental landscape and the social wilderness of early California. Dr Fender has produced an intriguing and highly readable book, which should prove fascinating not only to a wide range of students in the field of American studies but also to non-specialists who are interested in nineteenth-century American literary and cultural history.

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The West and the man of letters: confidence and anxiety
2. Fremont and the humble bee
3. The forty-niners: the stylistic pathology of the Overland Trail
4. The unofficial Gold Rush
5. The journalists' California
6. Mark Twain's West: the stillbirth of satire
7. The perennial critique and the poem of fact
Notes to the text
List of primary sources treated at length
An essay on further reading
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]