SOURCE: “Forging an American Style: The Romance-Novel and Magical Realism as Response to the Frontier and Wilderness Experiences,” in The Frontier Experience and the American Dream: Essays on American Literature, edited by David Morgan, Mark Busby, and Paul Bryant, Texas A & M University Press, 1989, pp. 51-64.

In the following essay, Ude examines magic realism in the works of early American writers.

A nation's literature cannot be studied only through the examination of content; a history of literature is also a history of technique. That is especially true of the United States, where our literary history has been bound up, perhaps more than in most cultures, with a search for both the techniques and the conceptual framework which might be capable of containing and presenting the full range of realities within which Americans have lived. Understandably, those realities begin with, and often return to, the experiences of wilderness and...