In their work on Turner's formative period, Ray A. Billington and Fulmer Mood have shown that the Frontier Thesis, formulated in 1893 in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” is not so much a brilliant early effort by a young scholar as a mature study in which Turner gave his ideas an organization that proved to be final. During the rest of his life he developed but never disclaimed or modified them. Billington and Mood also add that the Frontier Thesis is meant to test a new approach to history that Turner had been developing since the beginning of his academic career. We can fully understand it, then, only by setting it within the framework of the assumptions and goals of his 1891 essay, “The Significance of History,” Turner's only attempt to sketch a philosophy of history.

With the discovery of the new continent in the fifteenth century, a number of existing literary traditions contributed to the creation of the early image of America. In particular, Utopian features were projected onto the terra incognita. The equation of the New World with the earthly paradise and the Promised Land placed America in the tradition of ancient and medieval Utopian texts. The early picture of America is an indirect continuation of an ambivalent gendered view of the world predominant in most Utopias and pastorals. On the one hand, America becomes the positive projection of a benevolent female Mother-Earth who provides for all basic human needs; on the other, a number of intimidating gendered topoi are intricately interwoven with these new territories. The “feminine” appears to be a central issue of literary as well as pictorial imagery in the first narratives on America. As early as Columbus and Vespucci, America was stylized or allegorized through female symbols and metaphors. This paper will try to show how ancient Utopian concepts such as visions of a gendered paradise, myths of Amazons and role reversals, as well as notions of “women communism” were integral components in the creation of America as a myth. They can be traced in the writings of Columbus and Vespucci as well as in the early illustrations of their books. A selection of textual samples and pictures will serve as a basis for the discussion of these inherent gender issues.

Edward Weston (1886–1958) and Ansel Adams (1902–1984) were two of the foremost American photographers of the twentieth century. In their own day Weston and Adams attracted the attention of both critics and collectors, and more recently they have been given prominent places in the scholarship and exhibitions accompanying photography's 150th anniversary. These two Californians were good friends, achieved an influential modernist aesthetic, and created images with an enduring power and grace. They concentrated upon natural subjects, Adams tending towards monumental depictions of hulking mountains or clouds, and Weston tending more toward intense close ups of smaller objects such as fruits and vegetables. Such subjects were consistent with their deepest principles, for Weston and Adams believed that the artist should remain beyond the turmoil and confusion of current events, and instead focus upon the more enduring and transcendent qualities of nature. Thus stability and solidity became the leitmotifs of Adams's art, and even in those photographs where he included some turbulence to counterbalance the granite of his compositions – images such as Nevada Fall, Yosemite National Park (c. 1946) (figure 1) – Adams usually chose to focus upon the rush of a mountain stream or some other natural movement, rather than the social or political currents of his day. Likewise Weston brought a deep timelessness to his photographs. Images like Shell (1927) (figure 2) seem to hover in a decontextualized void of shimmering geometrical shapes, and have little connection to the predatory forces or environmental disasters that may have threatened a particular mollusk.

Critics have argued for generations about the failure of the ending of Huckleberry Finn. Ernest Hemingway began the debate by characterizing the escapades at Silas Phelps' farm as “cheating” his statement was soon followed by rhetorical volleys between Eliot, Trilling, Marx, and others whose writings, taken together, form a miniature canon all their own. While the ending has been variously defended on formal, political, aesthetic, and moral grounds, the very presence of a debate sustained for more than sixty years bears witness to the “problem” of those closing chapters. Perhaps the most simple, and ultimately unanswerable, criticism of the ending is that the characters have grown inexplicably younger – that is, they appear to behave in ways which disregard or “undo” their earlier, more maturing experiences. It seems inconceivable that Huck would go along so easily with Tom's Count of Monte Cristo escapades after witnessing the Grangerfords' feud, just as Jim's childlike acquiescence to the escape plan cannot be reconciled with the wisdom and dignity he had earlier shown as Huck's surrogate parent. Despite the ingenuity of even the most brilliant supporters, no reading can provide the characters in the closing chapters with those psychological qualities they so palpably lack; instead, supporters are left in the more awkward position of arguing that the failure of the ending constitutes an ironic success.

The term New York School is usually applied to a number of American visual artists working in and around Manhattan from the early 1940s through to the late 1950s. The group included abstract expressionists, abstract impressionists and action painters; among its leading lights were Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and Franz Kline. The typical features of New York School art were innovative individual expression and a rejection of past tradition. And while this led to the development of a number of independent styles, rather than a single group style, the overall result was a characteristic American avant-garde approach to art which had much influence internationally.

During the past decade a new school of writing has become prominent in the United States: a new realism. In the new realist novels, poems and short stories the condition of mourning recurs as providing both a symbol of and a structure for identity in consumer culture. The theme of mourning is frequently, although not always, explored in the context of invoking and reconstructing in memory the fathers, brothers and sons who were lost in the war in Vietnam. Reciprocally, the operation of images and narratives of the War in these texts casts some light upon the emergence, concerns and form of the new realist writing. In particular, images of the War provide a lens through which some of the meanings attached to sexual differences in contemporary American culture come into focus — a culture of which one may ask, after Julia Kristeva: “What can ‘identity’, even ‘sexual identity’, mean in a new…space where the very notion of identity is challenged?” The formation of identity through the structure of mourning is explored extensively in two new realist novels about remembering Vietnam: Jayne Anne Phillips's Machine Dreams and Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country.

It is the contention of Clement Greenberg that the development of modern painting can be seen as a self-critical process whereby this art entrenches itself more firmly in its area of competence. The area of competence of each art, according to Greenberg, coincides with all that is unique to the nature of its medium. Each art form, then, has an essence (albeit one which is only revealed over time) and the constitutive limitations peculiar to painting are considered by Greenberg to be “the shape of the support, the properties of pigment” and above all “the flat surface.” At first sight such a formalist perspective appears to have the advantage of being able to offer an overall picture of the development of modern painting, a unified narrative leading from Manet to American abstract artists of Greenberg's own time, such as Jules Olitski. I shall be arguing here, however, that a clear gestalt is provided by Greenberg's theory only at the cost of eliminating consideration of meaning in art. My point is not that Greenberg gives too much attention to form and not enough to content, and that therefore we merely need to balance the scales. Simply to supplement Greenberg's discussion of the formal aspects of artworks with a consideration of their content would be to accept implicitly the strong division between these two aspects which he makes. It is that very separation which I am contesting: I do not believe that it is possible to make worthwhile statements about form whilst considering it, as Greenberg does, in a vacuum.

Nothing in the literature and historiography of Virginia is more familiar than the “myth of the cavalier.” The term applies most strictly to the notion that royalist refugees of the English Civil War “were the immediate ancestors of the aristocracy which prevails in Virginia to this day,” as William Alexander Caruthers wrote in The Cavaliers of Virginia in 1834. It quickly became conventional to extend the usage to the descendants as well as the ancestors, and twenty years later another novelist, John Esten Cooke, found it natural to invoke the “beautiful dames and gallant cavaliers” of Virginia society in the period of the American Revolution.

Of what use is autobiography to history? At first glance, autobiographies would seem invaluable to historians. After all, no attempt to reconstruct or understand the past would seem complete without a sprinkling of quotations from some form of “eyewitness account.” Among the various forms of such accounts available to historians, the formal autobiography often provides the most comprehensive and comprehensible account extant of the personal experience of historical events. Yet even so strong an admirer of the genre as Allan Nevins was forced to admit that very few autobiographies were ideally suited to the traditional historian's purpose. Most, he conceded, were “imperfect” historical documents at best and could prove “far more deeply misleading” than many other historical sources.

For many post-1945 Americans, the title South Pacific does not describe a text so much as a process of remembering. For the cultural historian, it offers an account of production. It is the relationship of these that will be my subject. The pattern of the former will largely depend, of course, on the rememberer – something of a book perhaps, a play, a movie, a song, another song. The latter, albeit complicated, is traceable. It has a literary provenance in a 1947 collection of fictional narratives by James A. Michener entitled Tales of the South Pacific, variously described as short stories or a novel, but always noted as winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In translation to Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1949 Broadway classic, it adds another Pulitzer and a paperback fortune for the original honoree: to one of the most celebrated runs in the golden era of the American musical. It parlays that success into one of the first widely popular 33⅓ RPM long-playing records, memorialized in its dramatic connection by a cover photograph of Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza in the lead roles of U.S. Navy nurse Nellie Forbush and French planter Emile DeBecque. It then reappears as a 1958 movie musical spectacular, leading to another joyride of the Michener narrative on the best-seller lists, and to yet another best-selling LP, now in stereo, with the cover photo of the lovers, here Mitzi Gaynor and Rozzano Brazzi, resituated against a Hollywood backdrop of wide-screen tropical splendors. Along the way, it proliferates into endless road productions and revivals; television showings and VCR rentals; re-recordings and new recordings on LP, tape, and compact disk.

Recently, revisionist scholars of the “new Western history” have challenged the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner who, in 1893, canonized a view of the American West as wild and uncivilized, an area penetrated, conquered and subdued by the rugged individual fighter. These historians point out that highly developed Indian civilizations existed in the West, that “cultural convergence” not conquest was the historical reality, and that women played a prominent role in the over-all story. What has gone unnoticed by these revisionist scholars, however, was an earlier attempt by a Victorian woman artist to re-write the myth of the West in her own time, a re-telling much like the new Western scholars of today.

With the emergence of black nationalism in the late sixties, the delineation of a new black aesthetic became an urgent issue: it was first and most persistently raised by Hoyt Fuller in Negro Digest, and soon became the staple of radical black little magazines across America. In 1971, the appearance of a collection of essays entitled The Black Aesthetic and edited by Addison Gayle brought some coherence to the debate, and sanctified its assumptions. In his own contributions to that book, Gayle recorded the passing of the myth of the American melting pot and the consequent need to repudiate assimilationism. He argued that black nationalism implied the development of a black aesthetic in direct opposition to prevailing aesthetic criteria, in which white cultural concerns were privileged under a guise of “universalism”: this bogus universalism actually depended upon the marginalization of black perspectives and black writers by a white literary establishment. Such observations established the need for a new black aesthetic, and prescriptions for its form proliferated. These blueprints were handed down at a series of conferences at which black writers past and present stood trial against the new criteria. The emergent consensus was for writing that directly recreated the black experience out of which it arose; that found its style in the forms of “black folk expression”; that was socially progressive in effect – according to a very literal concept of functional literature; that addressed itself to the common readership of black people; and that assiduously cultivated positive black characters.

As a lifelong homosexual and sometime heroin addict born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1914, Burroughs' formative experiences led him to focus in his work both on the repressive social control of sexuality, and on the direct metabolic control of the body associated with heroin. Burroughs' work, developing the American Libertarian tradition rather than any form of Anarchism, let alone revolutionary collectivism, maps a quest for physical and spiritual freedom from a range of repressive forces including, finally, death itself.