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Show BOOK REVIEWS this gap and opens up new ways to think about the work of Catholic sisters on the frontier. ANDREA VENTILLA University of Pecs Pecs, Hungary Hell of a Vision: Regionalism and the Modern American West. By Robert L. Dorman. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012. xii + 256 pp. Cloth, $50.00.) IN THIS STIMULATING VOLUME, Robert L. Dorman, associate professor of Library Science at Oklahoma City University, explores western regional consciousness and identity between the 1890s and the present. Dorman interprets over four hundred scholarly articles and books, government reports, planning documents, novels, short stories, and films as manifestations of regionalism in this creative intellectual history. Dorman loosely defines the West as the seventeen westernmost states, excluding Alaska and Hawaii. His definition of regionalism is broad enough to encompass macroscopic views of the entire region as a distinctive, discrete area. It is also sufficiently fine-grained to encompass celebrations of local color and subregions such as individual states, river basins, and geographical provinces. This flexible definition allows Dorman to categorize far-flung works as manifestations of common regionalist impulses. A potential downside of this broad approach is that Dorman must be selective; he never mentions many significant regionalist works. The omissions are particularly apparent when viewed from the prism of a single state: prominent Utah authors whose regionalist writings receive some attention include Wallace Stegner, Bernard DeVoto, and Edward Abbey. But Dorman overlooks Stegner’s celebration of Utah’s cultural legacy, Mormon Country, as well as the writing of homegrown regionalists from Terry Tempest Williams and Dale Morgan to Juanita Brooks and Nels Anderson. Although readers will find little that is distinctively Utah in this book, they can easily fit the state within the broad cultural outlines sketched by Dorman. The author describes how between the 1890s and the 1930s the West came to be associated with agrarianism. Two Old West archetypes flourished in popular culture: the pioneer farmer and the cowboy. Theodore Roosevelt, Owen Wister, Emerson Hough, Frederick Remington, and Zane Grey helped to perpetuate these archetypes. Meanwhile, regionalist female writers such as Willa Cather and Mari Sandoz offered detailed portraits of rural neighborhoods that complicated the male-centric vision of cowboys and homesteaders. Dorman omits other archetypal western heroes, including miners and explorers like Lewis and Clark. 293 |
