SOURCE: Floyd, Janet. “Mining the West: Bret Harte and Mary Hallock Foote.” In Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition, edited by Karen L. Kilcup, pp. 202-18. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Floyd considers the position of Harte and Mary Hallock Foote within the literary tradition of the American West.

The category “Western writing” is a slippery one, and the exercise of forming and reforming a Western canon has become relatively obscure in the larger context of recent critical considerations of regionalism. Yet, even against a background where Western writers' status is liable to shift, Bret Harte occupies a peculiarly insecure position not only in relation to the tradition of frontier narratives traced from Cooper but even within literary histories of Western literature, where his work is rarely described. Mary Hallock Foote has disappeared in a more complex way from “Western writing...