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Abstract

This thesis is a study of the revision of the Frontier Thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner offered in the novels of Wallace Stegner. The thesis adopts a cross-disciplinary approach to literature and history, in order to indicate their ideological identification within the Western American context, in the form of myth. In its reading of the differing narratives of the American West produced by Frederick Jackson Turner and Wallace Stegner, a contrast is made between the ideological consciousness as opposed to the conditional materiality of the American western historical experience.