Recursive Frontier

Michael Docherty is Postdoctoral Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: "Metaphor that Becomes Epical"1. Dancing on the Edge: McCoy, Fante, and Desperate Moves on the Ballroom Frontier2. Pioneering the Office: White-Collar Rewilding with Chandler and Cain3. Wilderness Works: Making Race and Class in the Industrial Cities of Fante, Yamamoto, and Himes4. Ephemeral Accommodations: Hughes, Fenton, and the Architecture of Postwar Masculine CrisisEpilogue: "Steaming Remnants of the Fire"NotesBibliographyIndex

"…an essential read for anyone working in the field … The Recursive Frontier manages to expand the confines of the meanings of the frontier beyond its Anglo-white, exclusionary original formulation and thereby offers renovated critical paradigms to explore twentieth-century multiethnic fictions of the US West." — Western American Literature"The Recursive Frontier offers a richly detailed and carefully researched literary history of Los Angeles. By taking the notion of the frontier as a formative border zone into the city's varied environments, Docherty illuminates the quotidian rhythms of work and leisure and maps the spaces where domestic, private, public, and imaginary lives are lived. This eloquent study both adapts older paradigms of white masculinity and rewrites narratives of self-transformation at the core of frontier ideology in new urban contexts." — Audrey Goodman, author of A Planetary Lens: The Photo-Poetics of Western Women's Writing