• Pragmatist Individuals and the Nineteenth-Century American West in Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose and John Williams's Butcher's Crossing
• Gregory Alan Phipps (bio)

There are a number of biographical and literary parallels between Wallace Stegner and John Williams. They both came from working-class families sculpted by nineteenth-century westward expansion. Stegner's parents were itinerant migrants who moved extensively across the American Northwest. Williams's grandparents were products of the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889, and his father worked as a janitor in Wichita Falls, Texas (Shields 4). They each rebelled against their familial roots by pursuing literary studies. They were unusual among acclaimed authors of the twentieth century in that they acquired PhDs in literature, with Stegner receiving his doctorate from the University of Iowa in 1935 and Williams obtaining his doctorate from the University of Missouri in 1954. They both cultivated distinct forms of realism, adopting spare (if not stark) prose styles that stood in opposition to late twentieth-century postmodernist techniques. As Kerry Ahearn remarks, Stegner belongs to a "realistic stream of American fiction" that aims for a "controlled and rational" style (12). Jackson J. Benson notes, "His realism is sometimes so bitter-tasting that it is difficult for the reader to swallow" (Down 10). Williams, meanwhile, was a disciple of Yvor Winters, a Stanfordbased poet and critic who advocated a "restrained, classical style" and a species of authorial "stoicism," which involved "practicing rational acceptance of what is" (Shields 78). Working against trends [End Page 323] in late twentieth-century American fiction, Stegner and Williams also struggled to fit in with the prevailing literary and academic establishments of their times. Stegner taught at Harvard and Stanford, but he remained at odds with the cultural environments of these universities, ultimately leaving both of them. Williams, on the other hand, retained a position as an outsider among American novelists.¹ Finally, on a more general level, their literary works tend to share thematic perspectives and points of emphasis. Megan McGilchrist's statement that "Stegner's fiction concentrates on character development, self-awareness, personal loss, and the search for sanctuary in a world seen as hostile" could equally serve as a description of Williams's chief thematic concerns (1).²

The explicit parallels between these authors reflect some of the more complex intersections between their works, particularly Stegner's Angle of Repose (1971) and Williams's Butcher's Crossing (1960). Speaking broadly, the main overlaps between these novels involve their flexible approaches to generic conventions and their use of historical settings. They are both emphatically western novels, but they cannot really be classified as "Westerns" in the traditional sense of the term. Rather, both works adopt revisionary perspectives on the Western genre, questioning links between the American frontier and rugged individualism. In this way, Angle of Repose and Butcher's Crossing push back against older models of Western culture, especially those built around Frederick Jackson Turner's famous 1893 address "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," a work that locates an American ethos of individualism and liberty on the Western frontier.

At the same time, these novels also fit within an arc of new western history that unpacks and also critiques the implications of Turner's thesis. Writing in 1987 Patricia Nelson Limerick comments, "To many American historians, the Turner thesis was Western history," but she also asserts that the "apparently unifying concept of the frontier" proved to be limiting and exclusionary, packaging white nationalism, masculinism, and economic exploitation inside ideals of personal freedom (20–21). Relatedly, Richard White observes that the vision of the nineteenth-century frontier as an untamed wilderness populated by individual laborers is [End Page 324] misleading since "small, family-run enterprises and large private companies and public corporations developed side by side" (270). As works that fit within the ambit of new western history, Angle of Repose and Butcher's Crossing also subvert alliances between the nineteenth-century frontier and ideals of individualism grounded on labor conducted far from the centers of power in the East. As scholars have discussed, Stegner's antipathy to mythological ideals of individualism is one of the topics that surfaces repeatedly in his fictional...

• 实用主义者与华莱士·斯蒂格纳的休憩角度和约翰·威廉姆斯的《屠夫的穿越》中的19世纪美国西部
• 格雷戈里·艾伦·菲普斯（生物）

华莱士·斯蒂格纳和约翰·威廉姆斯之间在传记和文学上有许多相似之处。他们都是来自十九世纪向西扩张的雕刻出来的工人阶级家庭。Stegner的父母是流浪移民，他们在美国西北部广泛流动。威廉姆斯的祖父母是1889年俄克拉荷马州土地拉什的产物，他的父亲在得克萨斯州威奇托福尔斯（Wichita Falls）担任看门人（Shields 4）。他们每个人都通过从事文学研究来背叛自己的家族根源。他们在20世纪广受赞誉的作者中与众不同，因为他们获得了文学博士学位，其中Stegner于1935年获得了爱荷华大学的博士学位，而Williams于1954年获得了密苏里大学的博士学位。他们俩都培养了截然不同的现实主义形式。 ，采取与二十世纪后期的后现代主义技术相反的备用（如果不是鲜明的）散文风格。正如凯里·阿赫恩（Kerry Ahearn）所说，施泰格纳属于“美国小说的现实主义流”，其目的是“受控而理性”的风格（12）。杰克逊·J·本森（Jackson J. Benson）指出：“他的写实有时令人非常苦涩，以至于读者难以吞咽”（下降10）。同时，威廉姆斯是斯坦福大学的诗人兼评论家伊弗·温特斯（Yvor Winters）的门徒，他倡导“拘束，古典的风格”和一种颇具权威性的“门派主义”，其中包括“对理性的接受”（Shields 78）。在二十世纪末期的美国小说中，斯特格纳和威廉姆斯努力应对趋势[End Page 323]，同时还努力适应当时的文学和学术机构。斯蒂格纳曾在哈佛大学和斯坦福大学任教，但他与这些大学的文化环境相抵触，最终两人都离开了。另一方面，威廉姆斯在美国小说家中仍然是局外人。^1个最后，在更一般的层面上，他们的文学作品倾向于分享主题观点和重点。梅根·麦吉尔克里斯特（Megan McGilchrist）的声明“斯蒂格纳的小说集中于性格发展，自我意识，个人损失以及在一个被视为敌对的世界中寻求庇护”，同样可以描述威廉姆斯的主要主题问题（1）。^2个

这些作者之间的明显相似之处反映了他们作品之间的某些更复杂的交叉点，特别是Stegner的《安息角》（1971）和Williams的Butcher's Crossing（1960）。从广义上讲，这些小说之间的主要重叠之处在于它们对通用惯例的灵活运用以及对历史背景的运用。它们都是着名的西方小说，但按传统意义上讲，它们不能真正归类为“西方人”。相反，这两部作品都采用了西方风格的修订观点，质疑了美国边界与崎individual的个人主义之间的联系。这样，休止角和屠夫的穿越反对旧的西方文化模式，尤其是那些围绕弗雷德里克·杰克逊·特纳（Frederick Jackson Turner）1893年著名的演讲“美国历史上的边界的意义”而建立的模式，该作品将美国的个人主义和自由主义精神定位于西方边界。

同时，这些小说也符合西方新历史的脉络，它解开了Turn的论文的涵义，并对其进行了批判。帕特里夏·纳尔逊·利默里克（Patricia Nelson Limerick）于1987年写道：“对许多美国历史学家来说，特纳的论点是西方历史。”但她还断言，“边界的表面统一概念”被证明是限制性的和排斥性的，包装着白人民族主义，男子气概和个人自由理想中的经济剥削（20-21）。与此相关的是，理查德·怀特（Richard White）观察到，十九世纪的边远地区是一个由个体劳动者组成的无野的荒野，其构想是[End Page 324]由于“小型家族企业，大型私营公司和公共公司并排发展”（270）而产生误导。作为符合新西方历史范围的作品，安息角和布彻的《穿越》也颠覆了19世纪边界与以远离东方权力中心进行劳动为基础的个人主义理想之间的联盟。正如学者们所讨论的那样，斯泰格纳对个人主义神话理想的反感是他小说中反复出现的话题之一。