Book Review

In recent decades, scholars have replaced old myths of the West with new interpretations emphasizing the diversity of the region, the contested nature of the westward expansion, and the varieties of what was once considered a unifying western experience. Moving Stories brings together eleven historical and literary essays that reflect these new visions of the West. Organized around the theme of migration stories, the anthology explores the interplay between migration experiences and migration stories, arguing that, "ultimately, stories about migration and experiences of migration are inextricable" (p. xiii).	1
This interplay comes through most clearly in the first three essays in the volume. Theresa Strouth Gaul explores the way in which two sisters, both Overland Trail diarists, drew on literary traditions of romanticism and female intimacy to make sense of their experiences. Gaul argues that the sisters' recordings of their own experiences were informed, and limited, by the dominant discourses of the time, which shaped not only their written accounts, but, ultimately, the transmitted memory of that experience. Similarly, Linda Schelbitzki Pickle uses the frontier memoirs of German-speaking settlers to demonstrate gender differences in the recording and, consequently, the experiencing of the frontier. While male memoirs framed the western experience as part of an "outer" or public frontier and larger settlement movement, women saw their experience as part of an inner, personal world. In her study of the autobiography of Native American activist Sarah Winnemucca, Gioia Woods argues that Winnemucca's physical journeys allowed her to shift identities and move between cultures, languages, desires, and places. Movement shapes Winnemucca's life story and makes her life "a testament to the migratory West" (p. 69).	2
While Gaul, Pickle, and Woods explicitly bring together actual historical experiences with the stories these experiences produced, Matthew Evertson, Marni Gauthier, and Michael Johnson provide a more literary analysis of western stories. Both Evertson and Gauthier draw on the works of Richard Slotkin in challenging the mythology of an Edenic West. Focusing on A Man and Some Others (Charlottesville, VA, 1969), Evertson frames Stephen Crane's story as one both shaped by western myths and subversive of them. Likewise, Gauthier demonstrates the way in which novelist Don DeLillo uses images of violence and toxic pollution to dash the myth of the West as Garden of Eden and the frontiersman as Adam. While Evertson and Gauthier both draw on themes of violence and conflict in the West, Johnson uses Born to Be (1929; reprint Lincoln, NE, 1995), the autobiography of Taylor Gordon, to demonstrate the way in which the West has been depicted in African American literature as a deracialized zone. Here, the West emerges as a "natural" area, where race is less critical to identity than it is in the East.	. . .