Stories of Old: The Imagined West and the Crisis of Historical Symbology in the 1970s

For all the criticism that has been leveled against cultural representations of the American West, ideas of the westward expansion and its significance have remained powerful impulses for the negotiation of history and identity. Such notions of the past, and the cultural symbology with which they can be expressed, are more or less available to writers and other cultural agents for employment in political, cultural, or literary discourse. Understood in this way, the imagined West, to use Richard