The Frontier Hypothesis or the Turner Thesis:

 A Wisconsin historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, gave his frontier statement in a paper on "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" read before the American Historical Association at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. According to Henry Nash Smith (listed below), Turner's statement revolutionized American histriography and eventually made itself felt in economics and sociology, in literary criticism, and even in politics.

Turner's central contention was that "the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development." Turner maintained that the West, not the proslavery South or the antislavery North, was the most important among American sections, and that the novel attitudes and institutions produced by the frontier, especially through its encouragement of democracy, had been more significant than the imported European heritage in shaping American society.

Turner's most important debt to his intellectual traditions is the ideas of savagery and civilization that he uses to define the central factor of the frontier. His frontier is explicitly "the meeting point between savagery and civilization." From the standpoint of economic theory the wilderness beyond the frontier, the realm of savagery, is a constant receding area of free land. Free land tended to relieve poverty and fostered economic equality. Both these tendencies made for an increase of democracy. Turner was convinced that democracy, the rise of the common man, was one of the great movements of modern history.

In 1893 Turner said that "democracy (is) born of free land," as well as in his celebrated pronouncement made twenty years later: "American democracy was born of no theorist's dream; it was not carried in the Susan Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth. It came stark and strong and full of life out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier." - Henry Nash Smith

| Top | Selected Bibliography 1980-1999

Billington, Ray A., and Martin Ridge. Westward expansion: a history of the American frontier. NY: Macmillan, 1982. E179.5 .B63

Blanding, Paul J., Jon Tuska and Vicki Piekarski. eds. The Frontier experience: a reader's guide to the life and literature of the American West. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1984. Z1251 .W5 F76

Heyne, Eric. ed. Desert, garden, margin, range: literature on the American frontier. Twayne P, 1992. PS169 .F7 D47

Kolodny: Annette. The land before her: fantasy and experience of the American frontiers, 1630-1860. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984. E179.5 .K64

Mogen, David, Mark Busby, and Paul Bryant. eds. The Frontier Experience and the American Dream: Essays on American Literature. College Station: Texas A&M UP, 1989.

Mogen, David, Scott P. and Joanne B. Karpinski. eds. Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1993.

Sequeira, Isaac, and R. S. Sharma. eds. Closing of the American Frontier: A Centennial Retrospect, 1890-1990. Hyderabad, India: Amer. Studies Research Centre, 1994.

Simonson, Harold P. Beyond the frontier: writers, Western regionalism, and a sense of place. Fort Worth: Texas Christian U, 1989. PS 271 .S5

Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter nation: the myth of the frontier in Twentieth-Cent ury America. NY: Atheneum, 1992. E169.12 .S57

- - -. The fatal environment: the myth of the frontier in the age of industrialization, 1800-1890. Atheneum, 1985. E179.5 .S6

Sullivan, Tom R. Cowboys and Caudillos: Frontier Ideology of the Americas. Bowling Green: Popular, 1990.

Turner, Frederick Jackson, 1861-1932. The frontier in American history. With a foreword by R. A. Billington. Malabar, Fla.: R. E. Krieger, 1985. E179.5 .T956

Walsh, Margaret. The American frontier revisited. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities P, 1981. E179.5 .W34

Wrobel, David M. The end of American exceptionalism: frontier anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal. Lawrence: U P of Kansas, 1993. E179.5 .W76

| Top | Selected Bibliography 2000-Present  

Allmendinger, Blake. Imagining the African American West. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2005.

Daehnke, Joel. In the Work of Their Hands Is Their Prayer: Cultural Narrative and Redemption on the American Frontiers, 1830-1930. Athens: Ohio UP, 2003.

Fresonke, Kris. West of Emerson: The Design of Manifest Destiny. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003.

Goldman, Anne E. Continental Divides: Revisioning American Literature. NY: Palgrave, 2000.

Hallock, Thomas. From the Fallen Tree: Frontier Narratives, Environmental Politics, and the Roots of a National Pastoral, 1749-1826. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2003.

Johnson, Michael K. Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth in American Literature. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2002.

Kollin, Susan. Nature's State: Imagining Alaska as the Last Frontier. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2001.

LeMenager, Stephanie. Manifest and Other Destinies: Territorial Fictions of the Nineteenth-Century United States. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2004.

Lewis, Nathaniel. Unsettling the Literary West: Authenticity and Authorship. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2003.

Miller, Susan C. ed. A Sweet Separate Intimacy: Women Writers of the American Frontier, 1800-1922. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2000.

Moos, Dan. Outside America: Race, Ethnicity, and the Role of the American West in National Belonging. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 2005,

Muthyala, John. Reworlding America: Myth, History, and Narrative. Athens: Ohio UP, 2006.

Packard, Chris. Queer Cowboys and Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Paes de Barros, Deborah. Fast Cars and Bad Girls: Nomadic Subjects and Women's Road Stories. NY: Peter Lang, 2004.

Philippon, Daniel J. Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2004.

Smith, Carlton. Coyote Kills John Wayne: Postmodernism and Contemporary Fictions of the Transcultural Frontier. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 2000.

Stevens, J. David. The Word Rides Again: Rereading the Frontier in American. Athens: Ohio UP, 2002.

Vila, Pablo. Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Frontier. Austin: U of Texas P, 2000.

MLA Style Citation of this Web Page

Reuben, Paul P. "PAL: Appendix L: The Frontier in American Literature." PAL: Perspectives in American Literature- A Research and Reference Guide. URL:http://web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/append/axl.html (provide page date or date of your login).