In their work on Turner's formative period, Ray A. Billington and Fulmer Mood have shown that the Frontier Thesis, formulated in 1893 in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” is not so much a brilliant early effort by a young scholar as a mature study in which Turner gave his ideas an organization that proved to be final. During the rest of his life he developed but never disclaimed or modified them. Billington and Mood also add that the Frontier Thesis is meant to test a new approach to history that Turner had been developing since the beginning of his academic career. We can fully understand it, then, only by setting it within the framework of the assumptions and goals of his 1891 essay, “The Significance of History,” Turner's only attempt to sketch a philosophy of history.

During the past decade a new school of writing has become prominent in the United States: a new realism. In the new realist novels, poems and short stories the condition of mourning recurs as providing both a symbol of and a structure for identity in consumer culture. The theme of mourning is frequently, although not always, explored in the context of invoking and reconstructing in memory the fathers, brothers and sons who were lost in the war in Vietnam. Reciprocally, the operation of images and narratives of the War in these texts casts some light upon the emergence, concerns and form of the new realist writing. In particular, images of the War provide a lens through which some of the meanings attached to sexual differences in contemporary American culture come into focus — a culture of which one may ask, after Julia Kristeva: “What can ‘identity’, even ‘sexual identity’, mean in a new…space where the very notion of identity is challenged?” The formation of identity through the structure of mourning is explored extensively in two new realist novels about remembering Vietnam: Jayne Anne Phillips's Machine Dreams and Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country.

Nothing in the literature and historiography of Virginia is more familiar than the “myth of the cavalier.” The term applies most strictly to the notion that royalist refugees of the English Civil War “were the immediate ancestors of the aristocracy which prevails in Virginia to this day,” as William Alexander Caruthers wrote in The Cavaliers of Virginia in 1834. It quickly became conventional to extend the usage to the descendants as well as the ancestors, and twenty years later another novelist, John Esten Cooke, found it natural to invoke the “beautiful dames and gallant cavaliers” of Virginia society in the period of the American Revolution.

For many post-1945 Americans, the title South Pacific does not describe a text so much as a process of remembering. For the cultural historian, it offers an account of production. It is the relationship of these that will be my subject. The pattern of the former will largely depend, of course, on the rememberer – something of a book perhaps, a play, a movie, a song, another song. The latter, albeit complicated, is traceable. It has a literary provenance in a 1947 collection of fictional narratives by James A. Michener entitled Tales of the South Pacific, variously described as short stories or a novel, but always noted as winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In translation to Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1949 Broadway classic, it adds another Pulitzer and a paperback fortune for the original honoree: to one of the most celebrated runs in the golden era of the American musical. It parlays that success into one of the first widely popular 33⅓ RPM long-playing records, memorialized in its dramatic connection by a cover photograph of Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza in the lead roles of U.S. Navy nurse Nellie Forbush and French planter Emile DeBecque. It then reappears as a 1958 movie musical spectacular, leading to another joyride of the Michener narrative on the best-seller lists, and to yet another best-selling LP, now in stereo, with the cover photo of the lovers, here Mitzi Gaynor and Rozzano Brazzi, resituated against a Hollywood backdrop of wide-screen tropical splendors. Along the way, it proliferates into endless road productions and revivals; television showings and VCR rentals; re-recordings and new recordings on LP, tape, and compact disk.

As a lifelong homosexual and sometime heroin addict born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1914, Burroughs' formative experiences led him to focus in his work both on the repressive social control of sexuality, and on the direct metabolic control of the body associated with heroin. Burroughs' work, developing the American Libertarian tradition rather than any form of Anarchism, let alone revolutionary collectivism, maps a quest for physical and spiritual freedom from a range of repressive forces including, finally, death itself.