Book description
Mines have always been hard and dangerous places. They have also been
as dependent upon imaginative writing as upon the extraction of
precious materials. This study of a broad range of responses to gold
and silver mining in the late nineteenth century sets the literary
writings of figures such as Mark Twain, Mary Hallock Foote, Bret
Harte, and Jack London within the context of writing and
representation produced by people involved in the industry: miners and
journalists, as well as writers of folklore and song.
Floyd begins by considering some of the grand narratives the industry
has generated. She goes on to discuss particular places and the
distinctive work they generated-the short fictions of the California
Gold Rush, the Sagebrush journalism of Nevada's Comstock Lode,
Leadville romance, and the popular culture of the Klondike.
With excursions to Canada, South Africa, and Australia, Floyd looks
at how the experience of a destructive and chaotic industry produced a
global literature.
Janet Floyd is senior lecturer in American Studies at
King's College, London. She is also the author of Writing the
Pioneer Woman and the coeditor of Domestic Space: Reading
the Nineteenth-Century Interior, The Recipe Reader: Narratives,
Contexts, Traditions and Becoming Visible: Women's Presence
in Nineteenth-Century America.
