The American Elsewhere: Adventure and Manliness in the Age of Expansion

Adventure is a common thread in the mythology of the American West. In the era of manifest destiny, mountain men and frontiersmen blazed trails across the continent in ways that still loom large in the American imagination. The life of mountain man Hugh Glass, for example, has inspired numerous books and movies, including Oscar-winner The Revenant. In folklore and popular culture, these men are typically portrayed as bold adventurers and American heroes. By contrast, scholars, especially in the past fifty years, tend to view them as villains, agents of violent conquest. In The American Elsewhere, Jimmy Bryan proposes a third view, a middle ground that considers the influence of Romanticism on the emotional motivations behind both the violent actions and self-aggrandizing views of adventurers in antebellum America. Bryan bases his study on "adventurelogues," novels and memoirs about the West written in the decades before the Civil War.