America’s Barbarian Heart
Exploring Space, Genre and Social Criticism in Dave Eggers’s “Heroes of the Frontier”
Abstract
The article explores the narrative space, the combined use of various genre tropes, and the social criticism in Dave Eggers’s Heroes of the Frontier (2016). In particular, the essay argues that Eggers mixes travel writing, realist fiction and postmagical realism to turn the characters’ journey into an allegory for contemporary Americans, eliciting the readers’ mimetic responses towards a (renewed) frontier. Eggers’s narratorial commentary, which emerges also as a result of the use of an omniscient narrator, is presented through the dichotomy home/away-from-home typical of travel writing. This opposition is then reflected in the symbolic organization of the narrative space. Finally, the presence of actual geographical names invites the readers to approach the places described in the novel with a “tourist mind.”
Copyright (c) 2017 The Author(s)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
RSAJournal applies a CC BY-NC-ND license to all its contributions. This license enables reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. CC BY-NC-ND includes the following elements:
- BY: credit must be given to the creator.
- NC: Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted.
- ND: No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain the copyright and full publishing rights for their submissions to the journal.
- Authors grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License that allows others to share unedited work for non-commercial purposes with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
