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- Volume 29, Issue 2, 2010
European Journal of American Culture - Volume 29, Issue 2, 2010
Volume 29, Issue 2, 2010
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Making and unmaking myths of the American frontier
More LessDespite an extensive and expanding body of scholarly studies, myths and myth-making remain a central element of the American West. After placing myth-making about the American West in a wider context, this article explores recent literature about the centrality of myths in envisioning the region. For example, scholars have debunked three of the West's central myths, rugged individualism, American exceptionalism and frontier violence, but all remain alive and well in popular culture and political rhetoric. Among the specific topics analysed are mythologized people (George Armstrong Custer, Buffalo Bill Cody), places (Monument Valley) and cultural production (political, commercial, visual and print). The article also probes the motives and varieties of myth-makers, past and present, and the ways in which women and Native American writers today challenge mythical depictures in traditional western popular culture.
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The Old West in Modern Splendor: Frontier folklore and the selling of Las Vegas
By Karen JonesLas Vegas is customarily seen as a postmodern city of fantasy and simulation, a place where history and geography scarcely matter. In this article I argue instead that Las Vegas might be usefully described as a frontier city. When civic boosters sought to first sell their town as a tourist paradise it was the iconography of the American West that captivated public interest. In a place that invented theming, the frontier represented the original blueprint. Even when Las Vegas moved away from a western aesthetic, it continued to subscribe to a frontier mantra. Its culture of gambling resonated with ideas of individualism, risk, freedom and adventuring, while the constant reinvention of the city pointed towards a vertical frontier to match Frederick Jackson Turner's horizontal rubric.
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Southward expansion: The myth of the West in the promotion of Florida, 18761900
By Henry KnightThis article examines the ways in which promoters and developers of Florida, in the decades after Reconstruction, engaged with a popular myth of the West as a means of recasting and selling their state to prospective settlers in the North and Midwest. The myth envisaged a cherished region to the west where worthy Americans could migrate and achieve social and economic independence away from the crowded confines of the East, or Europe. According to state immigration agents, land-promoters and other booster writers, Florida, although a Southern ex-Confederate state, offered precisely these western opportunities for those hard-working Northerners seeking land and an opening for agrarian prosperity. However, the myth, which posited that, in the west, an individual's labour and thrift were rewarded with social and economic improvement, meshed awkwardly with the contemporary emergence of Florida as a popular winter destination for wealthy tourists and invalids seeking leisure and healthfulness away from the North. Yet it also reflected and reinforced promotional notions of racial improvement which would occur with an influx of enterprising Anglo-Americans, who would effectively displace the state's large African American population. In Florida, the myth of the West supported the linked post-Reconstruction processes of state development and racial subjugation.
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Spiritualism exposed: Scepticism, credulity and spectatorship in end-of-the-century America
More LessIn recent years, the study of spiritualism and occultism has been proposed as a key to understand the political, social and cultural issues of nineteenth-century America. While the position of spiritualism's supporters has been the subject of most accounts, however, sources that critically questioned the spiritualist claims have been usually left aside. In this article, I will rely on this extremely rich body of sources, in order to understand how the debate about spiritualism played an essential role in the shaping of sceptical perspectives in nineteenth-century America. Focusing in particular on anti-spiritualist performances played on the stage by professional magicians and on psychological writings that questioned the phenomena of the spiritualist seances, I will argue that in both contexts the spirit medium came to be understood as a performer, and the sitters as spectators. As a critical reading of texts such as film theory pioneer Hugo Mnsterberg's 1891 Psychology and Mysticism may suggest, the exposure of spiritualist trickery shaped a discourse on perception and sensorial delusion that anticipated in many ways later debates on cinematic spectatorship.
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Multiple personality and the discourse of the multiple in Hollywood cinema
More LessHollywood has been instrumental in the de-pathologization of madness and mental illness through the appropriation of the symptomatic language of one particular mental illness, multiple personality, to create a new genre I call the multiple film: films dealing with multiple stolen, assumed or mistaken identities, realities or temporalities. Within the old illness model the multiple was the result of trauma; in these films, however, the multiple is both the result of trauma (or of another more mundane problem) and the solution to the trauma/problem. In this article I suggest some possible reasons for our current fascination with the multiple and for the depathologization of madness, sketch out the characteristics of the new genre of the multiple film, provide some representative examples of the genre and, finally, inquire into possible reasons for the Hollywood epidemic of the multiple. I argue that in an increasingly mediated culture, narratives involving multiple realities provide an outlet for the anxiety we feel over our passivity and powerlessness. They redeem the negative connotations of multiplicity instability, groundlessness and relativism by treating multiplicity as a reassuring surplus of possibilities.
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Book Reviews
Authors: Linda Toocaram, Lorraine York and Lucas RichertFICTIONS OF AMERICA: NARRATIVES OF GLOBAL EMPIRE, JUDIE NEWMAN (2007), London and New York: Routledge, 208 pp., ISBN 978-0-4153-3384-9 (pbk), 18.99
MARGARET ATWOOD AND THE FEMALE BILDUNGSROMAN, ELLEN McWILLIAMS (2009) Farnham: Ashgate, 170 pp., ISBN 978-0-7546-6027-9 (hbk), 45.00
HAPPY PILLS IN AMERICA: FROM MILTOWN TO PROZAC, DAVID HERZBERG (2009) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 279 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8018-9030-7, 23.50 (hbk)
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 42 (2023)
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Volume 41 (2022)
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Volume 40 (2021)
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Volume 39 (2020)
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Volume 38 (2019)
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Volume 37 (2018)
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Volume 36 (2017)
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Volume 35 (2016)
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Volume 34 (2015)
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Volume 33 (2014)
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Volume 32 (2013)
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Volume 31 (2012)
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Volume 30 (2011 - 2012)
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Volume 29 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 28 (2009)
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Volume 27 (2008)
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Volume 26 (2007 - 2008)
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Volume 25 (2005 - 2007)
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Volume 24 (2005)
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Volume 23 (2004)
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Volume 22 (2003)
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Volume 21 (2002)
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Volume 20 (2001 - 2002)