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."

| Top | Selected Bibliography: Books

Barnett, Louise K. The ignoble savage: American literary racism, 1790-1890. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood P, 1975. PS374 F73 B3

Berwanger, Eugene H. The frontier against slavery; Western anti-Negro prejudice and the slavery extension controversy. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1967. E415.7 .B45

Billington, Ray A. The frontier and American culture. Berkeley: California Library Association, 1965. E179.5 B625

- - -. ed. The frontier thesis: valid interpretation of American history? Malabar, Florida: R. E. Krieger Pub. Co., 1977, 1966. E179.5 .B625

- - -, 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

Fussell, Edwin S. Frontier: American literature and the American West. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U P, 1965. PS169.W4 F8

Hazard, Lucy L. The frontier in American literature. F. Ungar Pub. Co., 1961. PS169.F7 H3

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

Hofstadter, Richard. Social Darwinism in American thought. Boston: Beacon P, 1955. HM22.U5 H6

- - -, and Seymour Lipset. ed. Turner and the sociology of the frontier. NY: Basic Books, 1968. E179.5 .H62

Klose, Nelson. A concise study guide to the American frontier. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1964. E179.5 .K55

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

| Top | 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.

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

Noble, David W. Historians against history; the frontier thesis and the national covenant in American historical writing since 1830. Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 1965 E175.9 .N6

Paxson, Frederic L. History of the American frontier, 1763-1893. Houghton Mifflin, 1924 E179.5 .P34

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

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin land; the American West as symbol and myth. NY: Vintage Books 1957, [1950]. F591 .S65

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

Taylor, George R. The Turner thesis concerning the role of the frontier in American history. Boston, Heath 1956 E169.1 .P897

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: Articles

Anderson, David D. "The Lost Dauphin and the Myth and Literature of the Western Frontier." Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature Newsletter 13.3 (Fall 19830; 12-28.

Bonazzi, Tiziano. "Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis and the Self Consciousness of America." Journal of American Studies 27.2 (åug 1993): 149-71.

Castille, Philip. "Jay Gatsby: The Smuggler as Frontier Hero." U of Mississippi Studies in English 10 (1992): 227-37.

Davis, Gayle R. "Women's Frontier Diaries: Writing for Good Reason." Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 14.1 (1987): 5-14.

Grabo, Norman S. "Ideology and the American Frontier." Early American Literature 22.3 (1987): 274-90.

Hark, Ina R. "A Frontier Closes in Brooklyn: Death of a Salesman and the Turner Thesis." Postscript 3 (1986): 1-6.

Haslam, Gerald. "Literary California: 'The Ultimate Frontier of the Western World'." California History 68.4 (Wint1989-90): 188-195.

Kolodny, Annette. "Letting Go Our Grand Obsessions: Notes toward a New Literary History of the American Frontiers." American Literature 64.1 (Mar 1992): 1-18.

Martin, Susan K. "Go (Further) West, Young Man: The New (True Blue) Frontier of the American Imagination." North Dakota Quarterly 60.1 (Wint 1992): 180-98.

Mogen, David. "Frontier Myth and American Gothic." Genre 14.3 (Fall 1981): 329-46.

Morey-Gaines, Ann. "Of Menace and Men: The Sexual Tensions of the American Frontier Metaphor." Soundings 64.2 (Sumr 1981); 132-49.

Nevins, Francis M., Jr. "Hopalong Cassidy: Knight of the Frontier." Columbia Library Columns 36.2 (Feb 1987): 25-36.

Newquist, David L. "The Violation of Hospitality and the Demoralization of the Frontier." Midwestern Miscellany 21 (1993): 19-28.

Person, Leland S., Jr. "The American Eve: Miscegenation and a Feminist Frontier Fiction." American Quarterly 37.5 (Wint 1985): 668-85.

Pfitzer, Gregory M. "The Only Good Alien Is a Dead Alien: Science Fiction and the Metaphysics of Indian Hating on the High Frontier." Journal of American Culture 18.1 (Sprg 1995): 51-67.

Seelye, John. "Captives, Captains, Cowboys, Indians: Frames of Reference and the American West. AMLH 7.2 (Sumr 1995): 304-19.

Singh, Sushila. "The Frontier in American History and the Concept of Masculinity." Indian Journal of American Studies 19.1 (Wint-Sumr 1989): 7-14.

Tawil, Ezra F. "Domestic Frontier Romance, or, How the Sentimental Heroine Became White." Novel 32.1 (Fall 1998): 99-.

Thomas, Brook. "Turner's 'Frontier Thesis' as a Narrative of Reconstruction." Centuries' Ends, Narrative Means. Ed. Robert Newman. Stanford, CA : Stanford UP, 1996. 117-37.

Westbrook, Max. "Myth, Reality, and the American Frontier." Under the Sun: Myth and Realism in Western American Literature. Ed. Barbara Meldrum. Troy, NY : Whitston, 1985. 10-19.

Will, Barbara. "The Nervous Origins of the American Western." American literature 70.2 (Jun 1998): 293-317.

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://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/append/axl.html (provide page date or date of your login).

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