Regeneration Through Violence

The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860

Richard Slotkin

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781504090353
• Subtopic: Early American History

National Book Award Finalist: A study of national myths, lore, and identity that "will interest all those concerned with American cultural history" ( American Political Science Review).
Winner of the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Award for Best Book in American History
In Regeneration Through Violence, the first of his trilogy on the mythology of the American West, historian and cultural critic Richard Slotkin demonstrates how the attitudes and traditions that shape American culture evolved from the social and psychological anxieties of European settlers struggling in a strange new world to claim the land and displace Native Americans. Using the popular literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries—including captivity narratives, the Daniel Boone tales, and the writings of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville—Slotkin traces the full development of this myth.
"Deserves the careful attention of everyone concerned with the history of American culture or literature. "— Comparative Literature
"Slotkin's large aim is to understand what kind of national myths emerged from the American frontier experience. . . . [He] discusses at length the newcomers' search for an understanding of their first years in the New World [and] emphasizes the myths that arose from the experiences of whites with Indians and with the land." — Western American Literature

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Chapter 1. Myth and Literature in a New World
• Chapter 2. Cannibals and Christians: European vs. American Indian Culture
• Chapter 3. A Home in the Heart of Darkness: The Origin of the Indian War Narratives (1625–1682)
• Chapter 4. Israel in Babylon: The Archetype of the Captivity Narratives (1682–1700)
• Chapter 5. A Palisade of Language: Captivity Mythology and the Social Crisis (1688–1693)
• Chapter 6. The Hunting of the Beast: Initiation or Exorcism? (1675–1725)
• Chapter 7. The Search for a Hero and the Problem of the “Natural Man” (1700–1765)
• Chapter 8. A Gallery of Types: The Evolution of Literary Genres and the Image of the American (1755–1785)
• Chapter 9. Narrative into Myth: The Emergence of a Hero (1784)
• Chapter 10. Evolution of the National Hero: Farmer to Hunter to Indian (1784–1855)
• Chapter 11. Society and Solitude: The Frontier Myth in Romantic Literature (1795–1825)
• Chapter 12. The Fragmented Image: The Boone Myth and Sectional Cultures (1820–1850)
• Chapter 13. Man without a Cross: The Leatherstocking Myth (1823–1841)
• Chapter 14. A Pyramid of Skulls
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright