Frontier violence comes home to white Americans in twentieth-century fictions that interpret the meaning of the western American past. Rather than serving to regenerate, Handley argues, violence surrounding marriage and family is a degenerative sign of a nation that believed conquest was necessary for freedom. Reading literature and historiography through each other, Handley explores white Americans' conflict over the meaning of American identity once traditional enemies against whom the nation had defined itself in the nineteenth-century West, such as Indians and Mormon polygamists, no longer seem a domestic threat.

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