Reading for liberalism the Overland monthly and the writing of the modern American West / Stephen J. Mexal.

Founded in 1868, the Overland Monthly was a San Francisco-based literary magazine whose mix of humor, pathos, and romantic nostalgia for a lost frontier was an immediate sensation on the East Coast. Due in part to a regional desire to attract settlers and financial investment, the essays and short fiction published in the Overland Monthly often portrayed the American West as a civilized evolution of, and not a savage regression from, eastern bourgeois modernity and democracy. Stories about the American West have for centuries been integral to the way we imagine freedom.

Includes bibliographies and index.

Introduction: liberalism and the language of wilderness -- Theoria and liberal governmentality: travel in Bret Harte's Overland monthly -- Narrative and liberal selfhood: Noah Brooks and the aesthetics of history -- "With which it was my fortune to be affiliated": social contingency in the life and poetry of Ina Coolbrith -- The limits of liberalism: Chinese, Indians, and the politics of cosmopolitanism in the West -- The greening of nineteenth-century liberalism: John Muir's wilderness and the discourse of civilization -- The brute's luck: liberal egalitarianism and the politics of literary naturalism -- Conclusion: the Overland group, luck, and the writing of the West.

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