America’s Barbarian Heart
Exploring Space, Genre and Social Criticism in Dave Eggers’s “Heroes of the Frontier”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13135/1592-4467/8561Keywords:
travel writing, narrative space, social criticismAbstract
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.”
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