What is it about?
A study of gendered views of the Colorado Desert in California (USA), using Biblical tropes about the desert and the 1911 novel "The Winning of Barbara Worth" by Harold Bell Wright. The paper considers the relation between changes in attitudes toward gendering and the expansion of US power and settlement in the desert Southwest.
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Why is it important?
A contribution to understanding how tropes about the US desert Southwest changed with changing economic and settlement patterns, and an effort to bring a neglected work of literature into this broader conversation.
Perspectives
This paper represents an early foray into a new area of research for me -- the study of human interactions with arid environments. Since its appearance I've published several other articles that treat literature, tropes about the desert, and adaptations to the desert by Romans in Egypt ("Naked on the Deserts of Mars," Extrapolation 57 [2016] 305-337; “Nodes of Sea and Sand. Ports, Human Geography, and Networks of Trade,” in Ancient Ports. The Geography of Connections, eds. Kerstin Höghammer, Brita Alroth, and Adam Lindhagen [Boreas Supplement 34. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2016] 9-36 "The Deserts of Los Angeles. Two Topologies," Boom California [May 24, 2017: https://boomcalifornia.com/2017/05/24/the-deserts-of-los-angeles-two-topologies/; "Romans in the Egyptian Desert. From Desert Space to Roman Place,” in Économie et inégalité : ressources, échanges et pouvoir dans l’Antiquité classique, eds. Sitta Von Reden and Pascal Derron [Vandoeuvres-Geneva: Fondation Hardt, 2017], 115-149). I welcome feedback and especially references to work related to my interests.
Gary Reger
Trinity College
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Making the Desert American, Cultural History, October 2013, Edinburgh University Press,
DOI: 10.3366/cult.2013.0045.
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